Creating Positive Peer Relationships
Creating Positive Peer Relationships
Positive Peer Relationships
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
- Salient Points:
- Peers play an important role in determining the quality of the learning environment; however, teachers are hesitant to allocate time for creating positive peer relationships favoring more emphasis on student achievement.
- Positive peer relationships are essential factors in promoting adequate social and emotional development as well as healthy adjustment in adult life.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
- Positive peer relationships are essential factors in creating schools as communities of support. Positive, supportive communities are characterized by students showing respect for the personal and physical safety and security of their peers.
- A central factor affecting violence in our schools is the lack of support and caring some students experience in these settings. Students are less likely to express violent behaviors in settings where they are nurtured, supported and cared for by their peers.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
- Peer relationships influence student achievement, note the following:
- peer attitude toward achievement affect students’ academic aspirations and school behavior,
- the quality of peer relationships/personal support affects the degree to which students’ personal needs are met and, subsequently, their ability to be productively involved in the learning process,
- peer relationships can directly affect achievement through cooperative learning activities
- at-risk students are more likely to feel alienated from school and have low rates of participation in school as early as third grade.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
- Positive provide a framework for the development of lifelong social skills and positive self-esteem.
- Although teachers often express concern about the negative aspects of peer pressure, the peer group can be a positive and supportive factor in the classroom.
- When students feel liked by their peers and when interactions are characterized by thoughtfulness and helpfulness, students experience a sense of safety/security, belongingness and affection, significance, respect for others and power.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
Group Development Stages
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- Groups, like individuals, have needs that must be met before the group can function effectively.
- Teachers must initially set aside time for activities that enable students to know each other, develop feelings of being included and create diverse friendship patterns.
- Classroom groups, like all groups must progress through a series stages (Posthuma, 1999; Schmuck & Schmuck, 2001):
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
- Dependence Stage: Group members look to authority figures to provide structure. Teachers provide clarity in terms of classroom behavior standards, procedures and academic goals.
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- Inclusion Stage: Involves the issue of belonging. Students are concerned with whether they will be accepted and liked by their peers.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
- Dissatisfaction Stage: Group members often express concern about how the group is operating and who makes key decisions in the classroom.
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- Students must become comfortable and feel safe enough to challenge the way things are being done.
- This stage is facilitated by the establishment of positive teacher-student relationships, giving clear classroom behavioral expectations, involving students in academic decision making and using effective problem solving skills.
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- 4.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
- Resolution Norming Stage: Students begin to work more collaboratively and listen more thoughtfully to one another. Students develop an increased sense of group unity and cohesiveness. Students make more positive statements about the classroom and the group.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
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- Production Stage: The teacher needs to assist the group in reestablishing cohesiveness and focus – this stage usually lasts from the third/fourth week of class throughout the year.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
- Termination or Adjournment Stage: group members must place closure on their group experience and begin to say goodbye. In many classrooms this involves a sadness and sense of loss. It is a stage teachers often fail to facilitate.
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The Importance of Students Working
Cooperatively
- Students involved in cooperative learning activities in which they study with peers and in which their efforts produce benefits for peers as well as themselves perform higher on standardized tests of mathematics, reading and language and also do better on tasks involving higher-level thinking than when they study alone (Allan & Plax, 1999).
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
- The authors’ work in helping teachers implement cooperative learning suggests that when teachers
take time to help students understand the reasons behind their decision to implement this method,
help students become better acquainted and
assist students in developing skills for working in groups, cooperative learning
motivation and learning for a wide range of students is increased.
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Creating Positive Peer relationships
Preparing Students for the Workplace and Community Life
- If schools are to prepare students for a society they must provide students with frequent and meaningful experience in functioning cooperatively in groups.
- Reyes, Scribner & Scribner (1999) noted in schools where Hispanic students achieved particularly well, that their parents were concerned with, not only, how children performed academically, but also, with nurturing values of respect, honor, cooperation, good behavior and responsibility of their children in school. (Refer to Collectivism in Diversity Powerpoint)
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Creating Positive Peer relationships
- The Employment and Training Administration (Washington, DC, 2000) identified the skills and behaviors essential for competence in the 21st century workforce. (Review Figure 4.1, p. 101.)
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Think About . . .
- How do classroom cooperative learning skills transfer to situations outside of the classroom?
- How will you encourage and support these skills in your classroom? Schoolwide?
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
The Issue of Self Esteem
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- Seligman (1995) in his book The Optimistic Child stated that the most useful and effective definition of positive self esteem involves both the component of feeling good about oneself and the component of performing well.
- He suggests that too much self-esteem application in school settings has focused almost exclusively on helping students feel good without the accompanying sense of being competent.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
Acquaintance Activities
Positive peer relationships are an important component in peer acceptance and are likely to discourage bullying.
Friendships at school can help children to compensate for vulnerabilities acquired through stressful experiences at home and can help children who might otherwise be victimized by peers be more accepted and successful.
(Schwartz et.al 2000).
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Think about . . .
After reading the section on acquaintance activities think about how you will use these in your own classroom.
Are some of the activities better suited to younger students? Older students?
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
Activities for Establishing a Cohesive, Supportive Group refers to the extent to which a group experiences a sense of identity, and oneness.
Cohesive groups are characterized by warm, friendly interactions among all of the group.
Cohesive groups provide settings in which students feel safe, experience a sense of belonging and view themselves as being liked and respected by others.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
- Group cohesiveness and a positive group identity develop by making the group seem attractive, distinguishing it from other groups, involving the group in cooperative enterprises and helping students view themselves as important components in the group.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
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- Classroom climate should be systematically monitored.
- Teachers must consider~
- how their classroom management and instruction influence students’ behaviors and achievements and
- how the school environment can be altered to encourage positive student attitudes.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
Issues Related to Peer Harassment and Bullying
Peer harassment is the victimization that entails face to face confrontation (e.g., physical, aggression, verbal abuse, nonverbal gesturing) or social manipulations through a third party (e.g., social ostracism, spreading rumors).
An imbalance of power exists between perpetrator and target.
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Issues Related to Peer Harassment and Bullying
Bullying: (often used interchangeably with peer harassment) is a problem in many schools; however, there are a number of programs designed to assist students in this area (p. 154)
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
Activities for Examining Peer Relationships in
the Classroom
- There are three methods of determining the degree to which children in the class are accepted by and feel involved in the classroom group.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
Activities for Examining Peer Relationships in the Classroom
Sociometric test for determining which students are most frequently chosen by other students as desired work or play partners to gain a sense of well liked students, not well known and isolated students
(e.g., students can be asked to list 3 students they like best, 3 students they do not know well and who they would like most to work with in class)
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
2. Sociogram created by recording the instances in which students interact with each other in the classroom.
A method for accomplishing this involves creating a classroom map and drawing arrows indicating when one student makes contact with another. The arrows can show the direction (who initiated contact) as well as the positive/negative nature of the contact via a + – sign next to the arrow.
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Creating Positive Peer Relationships
3. Questionnaire that allows students to report their feelings about the group and their position in the group.
A problem with questionaires are students must experience a fairly high degree of trust before they will accurately report the information.
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