Timing: 45 minutes
Learning outcomes: learners will be able to…
- Recognise how different online situations make them feel.
- Identify how others might feel in these online situations.
- Evaluate how bullying interventions can have positive or negative consequences depending on context and timing.
Key vocabulary: cyberbullying, emotions, regulation, strategies, intervention, bystander, upstander, positive, negative, consequence, impact.
Resources: Google Slides, ‘Considering responses’ worksheet (slide 6)
Key questions:
- Which emotions are high/low intensity?
- How do you feel when you see someone else being bullied online?
- Do you feel differently if it is someone you know/don’t know personally? Why?
- How might others be feeling in that situation?
- How do our emotions change the way we respond to difficult situations?
- Which emotions lead to better outcomes?
PLEASE READ THESE DOCUMENTS BEFORE STARTING THE ACTIVITY
Starter activity (10 minutes)
On slide 4, show learners a selection of words from the Mood Meter (see the activity ‘Take a meta-moment’ for more details).
Ask learners to discuss these words in pairs and consider the level of intensity of each emotion – where would it sit on the scale from 1 (least intense) to 10 (most intense)?
Invite learners to share their ideas about where each word should sit on the scale. Are there any disagreements? Can learners give an example of a time they (or others) might feel that emotion, in order to justify its intensity?
Activity (25 minutes)
Using slide 5, present learners with the example online situations and ask them to describe how they might feel in each scenario. Encourage them to also consider how the person being targeted might feel, as well as the person/people displaying the offensive behaviour. Learners can use the emotion words used in the starter activity or express other emotions not already included.
Show the scenario on slide 6. Ask learners to imagine that they witness this online, and they are going to take some action to respond.
Click again on slide 6 to show the ‘Considering responses’ worksheet and provide each learner with a copy. Explain that learners must complete the pathways on the sheet. Firstly, they should pick two emotions they might feel in the scenario – a more intense emotion and a less intense one. They can record these on the worksheet, either as words or as an emoji to express their feelings.
Based on the feeling, they should then give two examples of what they might say or do next (e.g. if they are feeling angry, they might choose to send a nasty message back to the bully or to report the bully to the game/app using the ‘report’ button). For each example, learners should then consider what the outcome might be (e.g. if you send a nasty message to a bully, they might start to bully you. If you report a bully, they might be forced to remove their messages or face a ban, etc.)
As a group, ask learners to share their pathways and encourage them to provide alternative suggestions for what they would say/do or what might happen next for different actions. For example, depending on their experiences, some learners might feel that reporting a bully doesn’t work and that nothing will happen as a result. Others may believe that this method is effective.
Discuss which pathways might be useful in some situations and which might be more useful in others.
Plenary (10 minutes)
Ask learners to look again at their pathways and decide which pathways lead to a positive outcome (i.e. they make the situation better in some way) and which lead to a negative outcome (they make the situation worse).
Encourage learners to select the ‘best’ pathway that they or other learners have created – what would be the most effective way to help in the scenario?
NOTE FOR EDUCATORS:
One scenario is provided for this activity. If time allows, you could ask learners to think of other cyberbullying scenarios and complete the pathways again to show how they might react in those situations.
If you so wish, you could also expand the pathways by asking learners to consider at least three different actions for each feeling, and multiple outcomes for each action.