How to beat the bullies
Cyber Mentors is an online peer mentoring project run by the charity BeatBullying. Two members of the team visited Langdon School in east London to lead a two-day training course.
Twenty-three young people, from Year 7 upwards, signed up to be members of the school’s online peer mentoring team. They came to the project with different reasons for participation but a common shared enthusiasm – and by the end of the training had earned an ASDAN Peer Mentoring Short Course certificate.
The first day of the programme gave students the opportunity to discuss the broader issues around bullying and to understand the nature and purpose of a mentoring programme. Responses were collated on sugar paper for later reference!
After a series of warm-up exercises, day two began to focus on the main subject for discussion, cyber bullying, and several of the group proved early on to be very knowledgeable about the subject. Students also participated in role-plays with mentors, mentees and observers. They concentrated on the acronym ITCH – Introduce, Time, Confidentiality, Happy – which gave a clear structure to each future mentoring session. Students also showed good understanding of open and closed questions and other crucial mentoring techniques.
The students were by now confident in their abilities and showed a mature approach to the activities. They were able to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of each student’s individual mentoring styles, swapping roles and learning from the experience.
There was a clear understanding of the boundaries of the mentoring role and when to pass more serious issues on to an appropriate adult. Suicide, self-harm, threats, drugs and truancy were among the subjects referenced, as well as the idea of using discretion and personal judgement in given situations. They were shown how to use the website www.cybermentors.org.uk, where users can upload inspirational videos, music and messages alongside the actual mentoring capability itself. There are currently 4,000 cyber mentors available via the website and, thanks to Langdon School, there are now 23 more.
During the final session students were encouraged to concentrate on how they had improved their own learning and performance, having engaged in a very wide variety of learning methods – videos, teamwork, using the website, role-plays – and what had gone well as part of the overall process, as well as what had not gone so well (logging on to the website was an issue!) Targets were referenced clearly at the end of the process and the students felt that the project had been a great success.