School bullying is a serious and pervasive problem that has been scrutinized by psychologists, social scientists, and educators since at least the 1970s. It is defined as a repeated, intentionally aggressive behavior that involves an actual or perceived imbalance of power between the perpetrator(s) and the victim(s) (Olweus, 1993, 2003; Patton et al., 2017). Bullying generally occurs at school (in the classrooms, the hallways, the bathrooms, the courtyards, and so on) (Hong and Espelage, 2012) and may take different forms. In a dichotomous classification, it may be overt (consisting of material actions such as hitting, punching, or kicking, or verbal aggressions such as insults and threats) or covert (consisting of less visible acts, like gossiping, social exclusion, laughing at, and isolating) (Byers et al., 2011; Power-Elliott and Harris, 2012; Platt et al., 2016). Research has mostly studied bullying at the peer group level, emphasizing its role in influencing the current and future behaviors of the perpetrators, victims, and witnesses (Salmivalli et al., 1996; Salmivalli, 2010; Boulton et al., 2017). However, while reactions from peers certainly affect how students may become involved in and cope with these events (Saarento et al., 2015), other facts are just as important.

Recent research has stressed the role of teachers in recognizing episodes of bullying and identifying their actors, as well as in preventing and intervening on them (DeOrnellas and Spurgin, 2017). Of course, teachers are continuously called upon to make decisions and act in these situations. This reinforces or inhibits the various possible behaviors on the part of the bullies, the victims, and the bystanders (Craig et al., 2011), and in general affects how pupils perceive and react to bullying (Gini, 2005; Twemlow et al., 2006; Bjereld et al., 2017). Indeed, there is evidence showing that students who perceive their teachers as disapproving of bullying are less likely to bully others; conversely, bullying is more common when students feel that their teachers tolerate it (Saarento et al., 2013).

In line with these ideas, we will examine some professional and psychological factors that affect how teachers perceive bullying and the chances they have to successfully intervene.

The chances that a teacher will intervene in a case of bullying appear to be associated with several variables (Ettekal et al., 2015), which may be associated with the confidence he has in his capability to deal with problems at school (Nicolaides et al., 2002; Alvarez, 2007). When teachers feel capable of caring for students, promoting positive relations among them, and managing matters of both learning and behavior in positive ways, students are far less likely to become involved in bullying (Roland and Galloway, 2002).

Denzine et al. (2005) identified the different facets of this feeling of confidence in self-efficacy, outcome expectations (OEs), and the specific causal explanations that are given for the problem at hand. The first two variables are related to Social Cognitive Theory (Woolfolk et al., 1990), while the last refers to Attribution Theory (Weiner, 1986, 2010).

Self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) is an individual’s subjectively perceived capability of coping with a certain task. A teacher’s self-efficacy is his own “judgment of … his capabilities to bring about the desired outcomes of student engagement and learning, even among those students who may be difficult or unmotivated” (Tschannen-Moran and Hoy, 2001, p. 783). This is one of the most important variables related to both effective teaching strategies and positive student outcomes (Gibson and Dembo, 1984). Furthermore, teachers’ self-efficacy correlates negatively with stress and burnout and positively with job satisfaction and commitment (Aloe et al., 2014; Zee and Koomen, 2016). Veenstra et al. (2014) showed that teachers’ self-efficacy has a strong correlation with teachers’ intervention against bullying; classes where teachers had high self-efficacy also had lower occurrences of bullying.

A different, but related, notion is that of OEs, defined as an agent’s beliefs about the likely consequences of a specific action and the chances that a specific outcome will actually follow from his or her successfully performed behavior (Bandura, 1997; Denzine et al., 2005; Williams et al., 2005). Teachers’ expectations about their students’ positive outcomes affect how they themselves behave and interact with the students in the classroom (Skinner et al., 2014). High expectations correlate positively with the educational opportunities granted to the students and with the construction of a positive emotional climate in the classroom (Rubie-Davies, 2006). High expectations also push teachers to increase their efforts to cope with problematic situations at school (Schwarzer and Hallum, 2008).

Weiner (1986) distinguishes between OEs and locus of control. The latter is what an individual expects about his or her capability to control or reinforce their environment (Rotter, 1966; Lachman, 2006). Teachers generally tend to attribute a student’s failure to external causes (external locus of control), such as social distress, personal, or family problems, while crediting themselves for a student’s success, attributing it to internal causes like their ability to challenge students (internal locus of control) (Wang et al., 2015). An internal locus of control is important for teachers’ senses of responsibility and leads them to intervene actively in problematic situations at school, such as bullying episodes (Sarıçam et al., 2012).

This three-factor model of self-confidence [self-efficacy beliefs (SEB), OEs, and locus of control] is well known in school psychology investigations (Taimalu et al., 2007), and it has demonstrated promising results in explaining teachers’ problems at school.

Literature analysis has shown that investigations on teachers’ intentions to intervene in bullying episodes involve two different types of teachers: preservice teachers (PSTs), i.e., persons who have no teaching experience, but are following a training program that will prepare them to become teachers, and teachers in service (ISTs). These two populations turn out to have different attitudes toward bullying. In particular, PSTs perceive themselves as capable of effective intervention in cases of bullying, but not toward all the parties involved. In research conducted by Nicolaides et al. (2002), for example, PSTs felt more secure in supporting victims, such as by encouraging viewers to be more proactive. They were also willing to work with the families, in particular the parents of victims. However, they felt less confident working with the parents of bullies and directly dealing with bullies. PSTs studied by Kahn et al. (2012) said they were more likely to take action in response to overt aggression than to covert. However, the negative outcomes experienced by pupils regardless of the type of victimization is an indicator that these teachers were not trained and sensitized to address the problem properly.

ISTs are generally less likely to get involved and intervene personally in cases of relational aggression (Yoon and Kerber, 2003). This population is more prone to leave the solution to children, both bullies and victims (Yoon et al., 2016). They tend to have low confidence in their ability to deal effectively with bullying, which affects their willingness and ability to get involved. In contrast to them, ISTs with high self-efficacy tend to differentiate between the various strategies to cope with problem behaviors and change their goals according to students’ needs and expectations (Zee and Koomen, 2016). When IST’s self-efficacy is high, the students, too, perceive teachers as highly effective in combating bullying (Veenstra et al., 2014). Conversely, teachers with a low self-efficacy are perceived by students as less able to prevent bullying (Crothers and Kolbert, 2004). While teachers’ attitudes and ways of intervention on bullying are routinely taken into account in the literature, investigations of the role of teaching experience are substantially lacking. In fact, beyond a teacher’s theoretical knowledge, his professional experience can influence his self-confidence in dealing with problematic situations at school, and specifically his choices concerning the prevention of bullying and the intervention strategies to adopt when necessary.

On this basis, we intended to evaluate two questions: (i) whether PSTs and ISTs would recommended different strategies of intervention on bullying and (ii) whether the different recommendations given by the two subject groups would be associated with different levels of self-confidence in dealing with problems at school.

This study aimed to investigate the differences between PSTs and teachers in service (ISTs) concerning the strategies of intervention they suggest against bullying at school. According to the literature (Denzine et al., 2005), the chances that a teacher actually intervenes are associated with self-efficacy, OEs, and the causal explanation given of the phenomenon. The study conducted describes the different associations in PSTs and ISTs between self-confidence and recommended strategies.

The results showed that there are different profiles to PSTs and ISTs. In both groups, participants with low OEs revealed a propension to intervention in the classroom. However, PSTs devised only a generic intervention, in which students would be invited to describe their experience. Without a specific plan aimed at supporting the intervention, even potentially effective strategies might end up counterproductive (reverse buffering effect; see Kaufmann and Beehr, 1989). As emphasized by several authors (e.g., Duck, 2007), PSTs in their first approach to classroom management feel unprepared. These feelings increase in the face of behavior problems by students (Allen, 2010).

In contrast, ISTs with low OEs tend to involve not only students, but also the parents, colleagues, and managers. This is an instrumental and emotional support strategy to cope with the phenomenon (Carver et al., 1989) and is a request for attention, help, and support for all the parties involved, namely, the victims, bullies, other students, and the teachers themselves. This finding confirms the use of various strategies (e.g., proactive intervention, involving families and others) to cope with the problem (Zee and Koomen, 2016).

Preservice teachers and ISTs characterized by high external locus of control tend to intervene only upon the victims and the bullies. This finding partially confirms the results from Nicolaides et al. (2002), as PSTs in our study were more confident in dealing with bullies. The difference between the two groups is that ISTs aimed at understanding the bully’s motivation, since experience suggests that the bullying behavior originated from a stressor. Thus, for ISTs, the source of distress is the variable on which to intervene. In line with these findings, Burger et al. (2015) found that most ISTs prefer to intervene directly on the bully in non-punitive ways.

Preservice teachers are also more likely to have a low external locus of control, and thus to ascribe changes in the relationships between students to their own behaviors in the classroom. Fajet et al. (2005) found that PSTs’ perceptions about how to manage the classroom are grounded in their own experiences as students. They carry these perceptions with them through their studies, their training, and even their early years of teaching (Allen, 2010). However, to devise an intervention modeled on one’s experience as a student may become dangerous, since high expectations unsupported by reality can result in burnout (Gold and Roth, 2013; Pillen et al., 2013; Converso et al., 2015).

ISTs with high OEs are the group most likely to intervene directly, because they are self-confident in their abilities to put an end to the problem. Thus, ISTs with high OEs are more likely to get involved and to not leave the solution to children (see Yoon and Kerber, 2003; Yoon et al., 2016). Furthermore, they have an array of strategies available to meet the students’ needs and expectations (Zee and Koomen, 2016). Teaching experience, particularly when shared with a supporting community of practice (the entire teaching staff), allows a clearer and deeper grasp of when and how to intervene. ISTs thus find themselves continuously learning from experience in ways both formal (e.g., attending professional workshops) and informal (e.g., talking with colleagues) (Olsen, 2015). This could be the first strategy to deal with the problem in classroom; as described above, when a teacher’s self-efficacy is high, students perceive teachers as highly effective in combating bullying (Veenstra et al., 2014).

Overall, the data show that professional experience is important for not only self-efficacy, OEs, and the type of causal explanation given of bullying but also for the interpretation of the phenomenon and remedies suggested. For example, both PSTs and ISTs may have a high external locus of control. What appears to change is the kind of explanations given for bullying (e.g., viewing it as grounded in the family vs. in classroom dynamics), the kind of intervention(s) devised (upon the individual vs. upon the group), and the approach to both the victim and the perpetrator (direct intervention of the teacher vs. involvement of other institutional agents). Professional experience allows for a wider range of possible interpretations and thus a wider range of remedies suggested (Sokol et al., 2016). This does not mean that interventions suggested by ISTs are necessarily effective, but simply that they tend to have a stronger sense of self-efficacy.

There are, of course, limitations to this study. First, since the sample was non-randomly selected, the results should be taken with caution and not be generalized. Moreover, the participants’ possible previous experiences with bullying (as victims, bullies, bystanders, or other roles) were not investigated; such experience, however, would likely affect one’s perception (Kallestad and Olweus, 2003). Third, the different definitions of bullying given by teachers (PSTs and ISTs) were not explored. We suggest that future studies examine the various bullying definition by PSTs and ISTs and analyze their roles in influencing current and future interventions in bullying situations. For example, a student’s behavior of excessively laughing at others (and the students’ consequence of fear of being laughed at) could be underestimated or not considered as a bullying behavior, though it might cause great distress in the victim (Proyer et al., 2012).

Despite these limitations, we hope this study offers interesting insights and suggests implications for educational systems. First, as far as the Italian system is concerned, we argue that adding specific training on bullying to university education courses might improve the chances of more effective interventions (Nicolaides et al., 2002); at present, no such training exists. The course should focus not only on the mere event of bullying, but also on its nature and causes, the protagonists, and the possible coping strategies with respect to the perpetrators, the victims, the classroom, and the colleagues, along with other relevant institutional roles. Teachers recognized as experts on the issue could be involved to describe possible individual- and school-level policies and to suggest how to manage the classroom in different contexts and situations (Allen, 2010). Moreover, we suggest the use of training strategies, usually not utilized at schools but well known in other contexts (such as health care institutions) (Rankin et al., 2015). We refer to coaching and mentoring approaches based on the role of the most-expert professional (Ghislieri et al., 2009); the role of senior teachers, who are well trained in dealing with bullying, could be pivotal to providing high-quality intervention in less-expert teachers (both PSTs and ISTs). Finally, the support offered by a counselor could improve a teacher’s self-confidence in dealing with bullying at school, recognizing the different overt and covert episodes, and identifying better strategies to cope with them. In most Italian schools, the supervision of a counselor is provided for students only. Our hope is to extend counseling to teachers.

Each participant was given a printout of the questionnaire, the information letter, and the informed consent form in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. This procedure is in accordance with the code of ethics of the Italian Association of Professional Psychologists and the Italian law (the latter concerning privacy).

DA, TB, and MT: substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; final approval of the version to be published; and agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.