A — The situation
A comic panel of a bullying moment, handed to half the class.
Going to School · Two-day school workshop · Ran 2025
DRAW THE LINE
The students could already name bullying. What they lacked was a feel for how much it hurts, and a response ready for the moment. The two days were built around those two gaps.
The bullying reaching these students happens in person, in front of everyone.
Childline India has cited that roughly two-thirds of schoolchildren report having faced bullying. We ran this with Going to School, an NGO that runs programmes in government schools: 33 students, Grades 8 to 10, one room, two days.
Research
They could already tell something was unfair. They couldn’t name what it did, or what to do about it.
To learn where students already stood, we held open conversations, not a survey, with seven students, three parents and two teachers, and read the research on school bullying.
The instinct was there. The weight and the words weren’t.
So we didn’t design to teach definitions. We designed to carry that existing instinct into an understanding of the harm, and to put a response in their hands.
What we made
Roles were taken by volunteers. The point wasn’t a harsh re-enactment: it was to show how changing your response changes how much the other person can actually do.
01Students freeze the skit themselves
Two of us act out a scene; the class claps to freeze it the instant they spot bullying. They caught it fast, which confirmed that sensing bullying was not where they were stuck. The rest of the workshop could spend its time on the two parts that were: the weight of it, and the response.
- 02
The theory, right after the skit
Five minutes: what bullying is, its types, why people do it, what to do. We didn’t front-load it. It came straight after the skit, once they’d caught it live, so it named something they’d just felt rather than introducing it cold. The only passive part of the two days.
- 03
The bystander game
The Day 2 centrepiece: rearrange a set of word cards into a spoken response, ring a bell, act it out. Deliberately scaffolded, not open-ended.
- 04
Situations drawn as comic panels
Twelve panels, twelve written responses, split across the class and paired at the front.
Every activity casts a student into a role, as the bystander, the target, or the one who acted, so the feeling is theirs more than it being described. Day 1 carries the instinct into understanding; Day 2 turns it into a rehearsed response. A fifth instrument, an anonymous sealed box, sat alongside these for research and safeguarding.
The judgment in them is the real output of this project.
Most sessions tell students what bullying is.
We had them stand in every role instead.
Three decisions shaped the activities: every student played every role, a matching game got a silent room moving, and students were given words, not a menu.
Moment 1
So we cast students into every side of it: the one watching, the one targeted, and the one doing it.
Most sessions cover the types of bullying, a zero-tolerance rule and a pledge to be an upstander. Students already knew the rules. Being inside the situation is what made them think.
Bullying that happens with other students watching
88%
Across 306 bullying episodes filmed on school playgrounds.
What those watching did
Stepped in19%
of episodes
When they did, it worked57%
of interventions
Hawkins, Pepler & Craig (2001), Social Development. Toronto, Grades 1 to 6.
The limits we held to
- Short, light scenes
- Roles went to volunteers
- Nobody played themselves
- Anything personal went into a sealed box, opened the next day
The cost: only volunteers took roles, so part of the room watched each scene from the audience.
Moment 2
We put a card in each student’s hand, so the room had to come forward instead of raise it.
Asked on Day 1 how they would respond, no one raised a hand. So the next game handed the answers out: comic-panel situations to half the class, written responses to the other half, paired up by walking to the front. A frightening open question becomes a low-risk matching task, and the room is on its feet before anyone has to be brave.
The cost: a matched answer is a handed answer. It shows a student can recognise a good response, not produce one cold. The next game was built to close that gap.
The two halves of the matching game
B — The response
A written reply, handed to the other half. Each student walks up to find the card that answers theirs.
Moment 3
The word-card game moves students from picking a response to saying one in their own mouth.
Facilitators freeze a scene; each group rearranges a set of word cards into a twelve-to-fifteen word response, rings a bell, and acts it out. There is no menu to point at.
The words are given, but the sentence has to be assembled and then spoken, which is a deliberate middle step between choosing an answer and inventing one from nothing.
01Facilitators freeze a scene
02A group opens its sealed packet
03They build the response from word cards
04They ring the bell when it is ready
05They say it out loud, in the scene
Built by one group, from the word cards
“Kisi aur ka rang dekh kar aisa behave karna bilkul sahi nahi hai.”The two days, as they actually ran
Outcomes
Measured by facilitator-led conversation and a show of hands over the two days, plus individual and small-group conversations afterwards.
30+
Raised a hand to respond when asked, by Day 2
14 of 33
Admitted, in our conversations, they had bullied someone
31 of 33
Said they understood what bullying feels like for the person on the other side
On Day 1, no hands went up. By Day 2, after building and voicing responses in the game, more than thirty of the thirty-three did. By the end, around thirty-one said some version of “now I know what this feels like, and what it does to the other person”. Not the definition of bullying, but its weight.
The one that stayed with me came later, in smaller conversations after class. Fourteen students, talking through situations they’d been in, told me they had bullied someone, and hadn’t understood until now that it was wrong, or how it landed. No names, nothing traceable. It came from a real conversation, not a raised hand, which is why it counts.
And one student made the point better than any figure could. After the workshop we gave the class an open classroom to come and say anything they liked, with no judgement.
“I didn’t even know there were types of bullying. I wondered to myself, have I ever bullied someone unknowingly?”
What we left behind
The workshop outlives the two days as a kit the NGO can run again.
The whole workshop, its activities and every asset now sit with Going to School as a blueprint they can take into other schools: a ready starting point for helping students understand what bullying is, why it’s wrong, and how to respond. It did what it was built to do: get a design running in a room, then hand it on.
Reflection
The design landed in the room and travels to new ones;
keeping it alive in one classroom is the harder problem.
The handover exists, but it points outward, to the next school, not inward to these thirty-three. Nothing was left embedded in this classroom to keep the shift alive: no teacher brief for their teachers, no student group among the cohort, and a two-day peak won’t survive an unchanged room on its own.
Next time I would leave something small and self-sustaining with the cohort too, and follow up a month later so there is at least one measurement taken cold, built in from the first day instead of the last. What I’m most confident travelled is the set of decisions behind the numbers: carrying an existing instinct into understanding rather than teaching definitions, scaffolding the response instead of handing out a menu, and protecting what students trusted us with.
- Role
- Research lead
- Team
- Five students
- Client
- Going to School
- Timeline
- 4 months
- Stage
- Shipped
- Surface
- Workshop
Scope of work
- Primary Research
- Research Synthesis
- Study Design
- Participatory Methods
- Facilitation
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