Nadine Lewis-Knight remembers how her uniform felt on her first day of school, years ago in rural Jamaica. It was fresh and neat, just like her two ponytails. Her teacher met her at the classroom door, crouched down to say hello and handed her a book with her name on it. “She said I could keep it forever,” Lewis-Knight says, recalling the moment she first fell in love with school. “It stayed with me that learning can be fun and exciting. That’s why I wanted to be a teacher. To pass on that excitement to every kid I met.”

As a teacher at the Warren Prep Academy, a public school in Brooklyn, New York, Lewis-Knight inspires her students to think outside the box. She gives them the opportunity to make choices and evaluate the consequences. “They won’t change the world if I’m thinking for them all the time. That’s not how innovators are created,” she says. But her class’s choice of local issue was one she didn’t know much about. “Cyberbullying” wasn’t a problem Lewis-Knight had faced growing up. “Cyberbullying was out of my realm,” she says. “But my students use a lot of technology and social media, and they’re bullied. That’s why they chose it.”

As their first step, her students researched the effects of cyberbullying on mental health and investigated potential solutions. Although Lewis-Knight was learning about the issue right alongside them, she helped serve as a guide, walking them through internet safety and online research skills—how to distinguish fact from fiction and identify credible sites. Hoping to add a layer of understanding, she reached out to organizations working on the issue, with the aim of inviting a guest speaker. It was a challenge, however, to secure anti-bullying resources for fifth graders, when most are geared to students in middle or high school.

“They’re exposed to social media, but there’s nothing out there to educate them about it—to help them be aware and knowledgeable,” she says. True to their training under Lewis-Knight, who refers to her class as “little revolutionaries,” her students were moved to take matters into their own hands. In the absence of learning resources, they resolved to simply create their own, breaking down the issue of cyberbullying not only for themselves, but also for younger grades.

As most of Lewis-Knight’s students have YouTube channels, they reached for a familiar tool—video. They conceived, scripted and shot the project themselves. The opening scene of their video reveals a group of students making fun of the new kid in class. When the teacher (Lewis-Knight herself) notices, the children attempt to hide their behavior. But the crushing impact on the new student is clear.

What happens next is what Lewis-Knight and her students think should always happen in such cases—a conversation about honesty and respect. The teacher encourages the bullied student to be honest about his experience and the bullies to remedy their actions.

Lewis-Knight’s class has screened their video at school-wide assemblies and opened the floor so younger students could have their say on the issue. Whenever the students witness a brewing altercation in the halls or on the playground, they reach out to their schoolmates, intervening and counseling as best they can. “A lot of them have endured bullying since they were in younger grades,” Lewis-Knight says. “They hold each other accountable.”

She may have been unfamiliar with cyberbullying at first, but she’s been connected to every step of her students’ effort, attempting to see the issue from their vantage point and inspiring them to be advocates for themselves and their peers. “I’ve learned to live in their world and understand what they go through,” says Lewis-Knight. “For me this is a learning journey.”