Don’t Be Bully, Be Buddy Erasmus Project

Project Title

Don’t Be Bully, Be Buddy

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Social dialogue; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education

Project Summary

Don’t be bully, be buddy; is a strategic partnership project aiming to produce permanent and measurable solutions to peer bullying problem frequently encountered in education systems of almost all developed or developing countries. With our project under the coordination of Yunus Emre Secondary School, we plan to realize with 4 different secondary schools from different regions of Europe and education culture:
1. To decrease the incidence rate of bullying, which is 39% on average, below 25%,
2. To increase the awareness of bullying types among our teachers from 52% to 70%,
3. To increase our teachers’ effective classroom management skills by at least 10%,
4. To reduce school absenteeism and early school leaving rates to acceptable levels because of peer bullying,
5. To develop guiding resources that our teachers can use safely in reducing bullying in the classroom and social activities.

To solve different types of peer bullying problems, the frequency and effects of which are seen widely in our school before the application of the project, the “Anti-Bullying Unit”, which we created with the coordination of our school counselor and with the participation of our classroom teachers, carried out studies in the 2018-2019 academic year. The unit aimed to show how our students need each other by motivating them to realize a specific purpose in the heterogenic groups in which the victims and the doers of bullying involved. Thanks to these activities, we determined that in some groups, complaints about bullying fell by 5%, but this rate was far from our target. For this reason, we want to develop a more radical solution strategy.

With our project, we aim to develop strategic partnerships with 4 secondary schools that have similar problems in 4 different countries of Europe, to share the knowledge, skills, and experience gained with the previous years’ studies on the same subject, and to develop techniques and methods in line with the requirements of the age and 21st-century student profile. For this purpose, we plan to carry out 5 learning, teaching, and educational mobility, each one is targeting a different type of peer bullying (physical, verbal, emotional, social, cyber). Our project is innovative in this respect because it targets all 5 different types of peer bullying with the highest frequency.

A total of 100 students, aged 11-14, and a group of 40 teachers consisting of school counselors, social studies, English, mathematics, science, and information technology teachers will participate in transnational mobility. Each of the participating student groups includes refugees and students with social obstacles, so we aim for our students to take advantage of the opportunities provided by our project who could not participate in transnational education mobilities.

Schools that form our partnership with these mobilities will provide training about the previous years’ work to reduce the incidence of this type of bullying and will have the opportunity to produce new and effective solutions in cooperation with other partner schools. To achieve this goal, we plan that each learning, teaching, and educational mobility will produce the following concrete outcomes in the theme of peer bullying:
1. The anti-bullying action plan.
2. 1-year training plan.
3. Daily lesson plan archive, containing 10 lesson hours (50 in total).

Our participant teachers will provide mentoring services to their colleagues in supportive and complementary activities at the local level to spread the knowledge and skills to be obtained through transnational mobility activities. In this way, we aim for our teachers who do not participate in the mobility to take advantage of the outcomes of our project.

To test the functionality of concrete outputs that will emerge after the mobilities, each institution will carry out pilot applications involving 10 lessons. All partner schools of the project will organize a seminar to disseminate the results obtained through transnational mobility and pilot applications in their education regions.

To ensure the sustainability of our project, we plan to share our project booklet, in which the planning and implementation processes of all project activities are explained in detail, in printed and e-book formats.

Sharing that includes all the activities of our project will be available on the project website, which will be online in the second month of the project, social media accounts and official websites of schools.

With our Etwinning project, which will be started in the 3rd month of our project under the mentoring of our project partner (IT) with the Etwinning school label, we aim to ensure that more and more national and transnational educators and teachers benefit from the project outcomes and concrete outputs.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 147095 Eur

Project Coordinator

Yunus Emre Ortaokulu Afyonkarahisar & Country: TR

Project Partners

• OOU ISMAIL QEMALI
• Szkoła Podstawowa nr 14 Fundacji “Elementarz” w Zawierciu
• Agrupamento de Escolas D. Sancho I
• ISTITUTO COMPRENSIVO G.VERGA COMISO (RG)