DASA (Dignity for all Students Act) is a law designed to protect all students from bullying. It serves an important purpose in schools in order to create a safe environment for students, free from physical, mental and emotional harassment. After receiving DASA training, there is much knowledge I have gained about what DASA consists, including from a teacher’s standpoint and my obligations as a teacher concerning DASA in schools. As part of our DASA training, we spent time discussing incidents of bullying we remembered from personal experiences and/or saw as students. With these incidents, we discussed the bullying spectrum and the roles of people involved in the incidents. A specific bullying incident I have dealt with occurred recently as
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The DASA training educated me on important facts of bullying, including how harassment and bullying are essentially the same meanings according to New York State law. Additionally, I was unaware that bullying only needs to occur once in order to be considered an act of bullying. Prior to learning this through DASA, I was under the impression that bullying was classified through reoccurring incidents. This is important as a part of DASA in schools since bullying is traumatizing to a student after one occurrence let alone multiple times. Reflecting back on this bullying incident I observed, I believe it would have been best to speak to the aggressors in this situation individually. As we discussed in the DASA training, it is best to speak to each student individually about an incident. Speaking to all three students at once seemed to be ineffective since they did not appear to take the situation and my words as seriously as they may have if they were separated from peer influence. Furthermore, in addition to reporting the incident to my cooperating teacher, I would personally document the incident with information including what I saw happen, the students involved and the information each student told me. In any situation where bullying is seen or even suspected, it is essential to document and fill out a
The DASA training educated me on important facts of bullying, including how harassment and bullying are essentially the same meanings according to New York State law. Additionally, I was unaware that bullying only needs to occur once in order to be considered an act of bullying. Prior to learning this through DASA, I was under the impression that bullying was classified through reoccurring incidents. This is important as a part of DASA in schools since bullying is traumatizing to a student after one occurrence let alone multiple times. Reflecting back on this bullying incident I observed, I believe it would have been best to speak to the aggressors in this situation individually. As we discussed in the DASA training, it is best to speak to each student individually about an incident. Speaking to all three students at once seemed to be ineffective since they did not appear to take the situation and my words as seriously as they may have if they were separated from peer influence. Furthermore, in addition to reporting the incident to my cooperating teacher, I would personally document the incident with information including what I saw happen, the students involved and the information each student told me. In any situation where bullying is seen or even suspected, it is essential to document and fill out a