About: Jon Konen

Jon Konen is a high school principal and freelance writer in Columbia Falls, Montana. He has been a superintendent and has taught most all grade levels K-6, and has been an instructional coach. In addition, he has been an elementary and middle principal. As a 5th grade teacher, in 2010 he won the Presidential Award for Elementary Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST). As a principal, his school won the 2012 Blue Ribbon Award. In 2018, he won the National Distinguished Principal Award (NDP). In 2019 he won the National No Kid Hungry Breakfast Hero Award. He is the author of three guides published on teacher.org: An Educator's Guide to Combat Bullying & Bully Prevention; Teacher Evaluation: A Transition Guide to Exemplary Performance; and You are the Wild Card: Infusing Fun Back into Curriculum. He has authored a children's picture book that was released January 2019 titled Benjamin’s Visit to Principal Reads Office…again! (available at www.archwaypublishing.com)

Recent Posts by Jon Konen

13 Community Bullying Prevention Ideas for Schools

Laptop screen reading Stop Bullying on a sunlit desk, with glasses, a notepad, and an adult working on a tablet
Community bullying prevention works when the school stops carrying the effort alone. Local businesses, police, service clubs, faith groups, and parents each take a visible role, so students hear the same message everywhere they go. The 13 ideas below are ones we have actually run in our own district. [xyz_feat_school] A school can run a…
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Types of Cyberbullying: 6 Tactics Students Use and What to Do

Chalkboard sign in neon marker reading No Wifi: talk to each other, call your mom, pretend it's 1993, live!
The main types of cyberbullying are outing, harassment and name-calling, catfishing with fake accounts, sharing explicit or humiliating images, forwarding hurtful posts, and threats or intimidation. Repetition and a power imbalance are central to how bullying is defined, though conduct like threats, stalking, or non-consensual image sharing can require a response without meeting that definition.…
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3 Types of Bullying in Schools + 1 Immense Social Challenge

Girl sitting alone on the grass while two classmates behind her whisper and look in her direction
The types of bullying in schools fall into three behavior categories (verbal, physical, and psychological) plus cyberbullying, which cuts across all three. All four share the same markers: unwanted aggression, a power imbalance, and repetition or a high likelihood of it. Which type you're looking at shapes how you document it. [xyz_feat_school] About 19.2% of…
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Tracking Bullying Incidents: 20 Ideas to Use Bully Data

Hand drawing a chalkboard diagram of tangled white lines resolving into a yellow bullseye and straight arrows
Start tracking bullying incidents by logging every report with the same fields: date, time, location, grade, students involved, incident type, and severity. Review the log monthly for patterns rather than case by case. Those patterns tell you where to add supervision, which students may need additional behavioral supports, and what professional development your staff actually…
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Provocative Victims and 7+ Practices for Victory

Teen girl gestures while talking with her father in a kitchen as her mother and younger brother look on
"Provocative victim" is a term from older bullying literature for a student who is both experiencing bullying and engaging in provoking or escalating behavior toward peers. Terminology and definitions vary across the research, and the label carries a real risk of sounding like blame. It describes a pattern staff are seeing, not a reason a…
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9 Conflict Resolution Strategies to Teach Students

Woman and young boy lean on opposite sides of a table, facing each other at eye level in conversation
Conflict resolution strategies for students are the scripts a child can use when an ordinary disagreement starts: telling someone to stop, using an I message, taking a break, or walking away. Calming down is often a useful first step when it is safe to do so. Safety concerns and suspected bullying go straight to an…
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Bystander Roles in Bullying: The Bully Circle Lesson

Student standing with arms crossed in front of a chalkboard with chalk-drawn flexing muscle arms behind them
Bystander roles in bullying describe the positions students take when they witness it: assisting, reinforcing, watching passively, or defending. The Bully Circle maps seven roles involved in a bullying situation around the student being bullied. Teaching students to name their own role is what moves them from passive bystander to active defender. [xyz_feat_school] Back to…
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11 Communication Strategies to Combat Bullying

illustration contrasting a silhouette blocking out communication with one speaking through a megaphone
Communication strategies to combat bullying work when they run in both directions between every pair of adults and students in a school, not just top-down from staff to students. The most effective schools build deliberate channels among staff, students, parents, and the community, so a bullying incident gets reported, addressed, and followed up on instead…
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5 Reasons Schools Have a Hard Time Stopping Bullying

Here's why schools have a hard time stopping bullying: many reports turn out, on investigation, to be arguments, rough play, or an overused label rather than the aggressive, repeated, power-imbalanced behavior most bullying frameworks describe. Legal definitions vary by state, and FERPA limits what a school can say publicly, which fuels the sense that nothing…
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How to Raise a Defender: 7 Ways to Build an Upstander Against Bullying

child in a red cape and lightning-bolt shirt standing with hands on hips
Back to the main Bully Prevention Guide. One important defense against bullying is helping children learn to act as upstanders rather than passive bystanders, while also giving them safe ways to involve adults and protect themselves and others. Parents and educators can support that by modeling giving, service, responsibility, real-world reflection, kindness, respect for differences,…
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