We wanted to raise the level of awareness about the existence of bullying and cyberbullying among students and develop the competence of positive social skills among students, teachers and parents of students. We wanted to train teachers and students to know how to recognize abusive behavior, to report it and to know how to deal with abusers and to effectively prevent unwanted behavior. Managing one's own emotions and establishing a pleasant and positive classroom climate proved to be the most important components necessary for the cognitive, emotional development of students and all stakeholders in the school. We introduced mindfulness, conscious breathing and body stretching techniques into the teaching process. We wanted to introduce content that helps develop positive social skills in students such as empathy, support, mutual acceptance and sharing of common problems, whereby students and teachers support each other and create prerequisites for the mental and physical health of the individual, and thus of the wider community. We wanted to achieve the empowerment of the teacher as a person and a professional who works daily with young people and parents in a dynamic, demanding and very stressful and challenging environment.
Eugen Kumičić's primary school needed to improve two important areas: 1. prevention of peer abuse and abuse via the Internet 2. development of positive social skills competencies among students, teachers and parents of students. Since the School is included in the Croatian project of digitally mature schools, students are required to work on digital devices and use digital educational content, which means that they have access to the Internet, and thus inappropriate content as well as the possibility of mutual cyberbullying. Research conducted in the EU, Croatia and in the Virovitica-Podravina County proves a high level of cyber abuse in the form of sexting and sextorting, and in this sense we wanted to direct both teachers and students to the prevention of the aforementioned phenomena and behavior as well as the mitigation of their consequences. Pedagogical measures imposed on the students of the School pointed to the need to act in order to encourage the emotional literacy of students and the development of positive social skills, as well as the acquisition of knowledge and skills that will be tools for self-regulation of emotions and behavior, such as conscious breathing, mindfulness body stretching exercises.