No Name-Calling Week is coming

This year the week of 26-30 January is “No Name-Calling Week,” an annual week when participating educators employ activities designed to deter students from calling others names. In part it is an effort to eliminate bullying in their schools, but it is also an excellent chance for teachers to practice the skillful use of modeling and reinforcement.

Here are what I suggest as important features of an effort to reduce the use of derogatory comments about others:

1. Teach the students to discriminate polite and derogatory comments; give examples and have them label each (e.g., “‘He’s a slob.’ Was that a polite comment?”);
2. Identify situations where name-calling frequently occurs;
3. Have students roll-play those situations with the proviso that they use polite language rather than making derogatory comments;
   1. Provide recognition and praise for making polite comments during the roll plays;
   2. Provide recognition and praise for responding to polite comments with other polite comments;
4. Explain to the students that you, the teacher, and your colleagues will be observing in classrooms, hallways, and other areas for students who deserve recognition for using polite language; a school could even have teams (designated by wearing colored badges?) and use a variant of the Good Behavior Game for this;
5. Continue the program well past the target week, gradually reducing the monitoring and rewards.

Someone can surely create a better plan than this, but I hope it illustrates importante directions for promoting peace.

Here’s information about No Name-Calling Week from a Web site devoted to the effort:

No Name-Calling Week was inspired by a young adult novel entitled “The Misfits” by popular author, James Howe. The book tells the story of four best friends trying to survive the seventh grade in the face of all too frequent taunts based on their weight, height, intelligence, and sexual orientation/gender expression. Motivated by the inequities they see around them, the “Gang of Five” (as they are known) creates a new political party during student council elections and run on a platform aimed at wiping out name-calling of all kinds. Though they lose the election, they win the support of the school’s principal for their cause and their idea for a “No Name-Calling Day” at school.

Motivated by this simple, yet powerful, idea, the No Name-Calling Week Coalition, created by GLSEN and Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, and consisting of over 40 national partner organizations, organized an actual No Name-Calling Week in schools across the nation during the week of March 1-5, 2004. This year, No Name-Calling Week will take place the week of January 26-30, 2009. The project seeks to focus national attention on the problem of name-calling in schools, and to provide students and educators with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate name-calling in their communities.