Mobbing in the teaching staff

Few people talk and write about mobbing in the teaching staff. Sergey Aleksandrovich Druzhilov was one of the first in Russia to develop the topic of destructive relations in the teaching staff in the late 1990s. And I began to actively develop my website to help colleagues and teachers who found themselves as a “victim” in a mobbing situation in the workplace. And if in 2011, when they started to rot me at the department, I knew as much about mobbing as I now know about this socio-psychological phenomenon, then it would be much easier for me to fight and protect my personal and professional dignity.

In 2013, I created this site, which was the first on the Russian-language Internet on this topic. And from the very beginning, my main task was to help people identify mobbing/bulling/bossing/harassment from the very first attacks in order to learn how to resist or avoid it. When the Tolerance Center, together with the Education Group, asked me to conduct a webinar on mobbing in the school teaching staff, I started collecting information specifically about the specifics of mobbing in the school workforce. At the same time, I realized that this topic was even more taboo than university mobbing. I haven't found any studies that describe bullying in the school workforce. And then I conducted a survey among teachers, my Facebook subscribers, to find out about the situation of teachers in schools and the relationship between teachers and school administrators. I asked them to recall cases involving the humiliation of the personal and professional dignity of teachers in their workplace, and I asked them to talk about the levers of influence on teachers to force them out of school or take them into line. I conducted a survey among 10 teachers from Moscow schools and schools in other regions of the Russian Federation. Of course, this survey cannot be considered representative, but the results, in my opinion, can tell us a lot. For example, almost all teachers reported similar stories about stereotypical workplace harassment. Based on my colleagues' answers, I was able to draw conclusions about whether their school staff is a destructive group in which school management introduces destructive values - selfishness, denunciation, manipulation, persecution of colleagues in order to curry favor with management. Some teachers told me that they had already left these schools because they had been bullied. Unfortunately, they have spent too long in this toxic environment and have undermined their health.

The goal of my first webinar on this topic is to help teachers recognize the signs of mobbing in time and not let themselves be offended by protecting their personal and professional dignity. Listen to my webinar where I shared my survey results with teachers. If these situations seemed familiar to you, please write to me about it here on the website under the “Consultation” section or in a personal message on the Facebook page of the same name. I'll keep you anonymous, but it's important for us to collect your stories of humiliation, struggle and rescue to support other educators. You can watch and listen to the webinar here:How mobbing affects the educational process