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Peer Relationships in Classroom Management
Evidence and Interventions for Teaching
Martin H. Jones, Martin H. Jones
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eBook - ePub
Peer Relationships in Classroom Management
Evidence and Interventions for Teaching
Martin H. Jones, Martin H. Jones
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About This Book
Peer Relationships in Classroom Management offers pragmatic, empirically validated guidance to teachers in training on issues pertaining to students' interpersonal relationships. Concepts such as bullying, popularity, and online friendships are ubiquitous in today's schools, but what kinds of scientific and pedagogical knowledge can support teachers navigating students' complex lives? Using real-world examples and case studies, this book helps preservice educators to enhance their knowledge of classroom management by focusing on the interpersonal relationships in their schools. Each chapter includes an accessible approach to understanding the social motives in student's peer interactions inside school, and how to best intervene when these social interactions become detrimental to learning or cause negative interpersonal interactions.
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PART I
Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148647-1
1
What Are Peer Relationships in School? An Overview
DOI: 10.4324/9781003148647-2
When my student turned the corner, I already knew the outcome. Still, I had to follow through using what little skills I had. I turned the corner to see my student pinning a smaller kid against the wall. I yelled out, âJake!â Then yelled out, âJake, what are you doing?!â As I ran up to my student, the principal popped out of his nearby office, âJake, youâre done.â A few days later, Jake left the school for a state-run educational institution for problematic youth. My schoolâs administration and my studentâs parents supported his removal. Jakeâs educational opportunities dwindled. He would now spend his days with other students who had much bigger problems ranging from dealing drugs to attempted murder. What I did not know then, but understand now, is that it could all have been prevented, but nobody involved had the training.
Jake had an early growth spurt and quickly became the most popular student in his grade. He had no idea how to wield the power of his popularity in a positive way. He learned that popularity could be used to manipulate other kids into fighting and stealing for him. Jakeâs parents, the principal, and his teachers (including me) did not know how to handle his situation. Where Jake is today still haunts me. I have no idea if he changed, or if the downward spiral was already cast.
My experience with Jake and countless other students is why this book is so important. Your studentsâ academic success is partly contingent on how they interact with their classmates. If your students handle their relationships poorly in class, then they are at greater risk for failing classes and dropping out of school. If your students have positive peer relationships, then they get better grades, feel supported when they do fail, and push other students to becoming successful.
Despite the importance that peers have in the classroom, teachers often get little, if any, training in understanding and managing peer relationships in their own classroom. I do not fault teacher training programs for this lack of training because there is so much to teach future teachers in a few short years. Rather, I hope this book provides some additional information and useful knowledge on how to handle studentsâ interpersonal relationships before and after going into the classroom for the first.
To help build your knowledge, and hopefully boost your confidence a little, too, each chapter in this book explores what experts in the field now understand about peer relationships in the classroom. The authors are internationally recognized experts in the field and are educators themselves. Their knowledge and pedagogical skills should help you better understand how best to handle some of the complex interpersonal issues affecting your classroom. Each chapter utilizes expertsâ knowledge to answer common questions involving studentsâ peer relationships in school.
I tasked the chaptersâ authors to help answer questions about peer relationships in the classroom using scientifically valid evidence and their professional opinion. Their answers provide some of the most insightful and scientifically accurate guidance currently available for handling a wide range of issues occurring among classmatesâ social interactions in school. Each chapter includes specific tactics for managing interpersonal relationships in the classroom to more successfully educate your students. These tactics draw from the authorsâ years of teaching experience, their own research on classroom relationships, and an ever-growing body of research on the many facets of studentsâ peer relationships.
This book will then serve as an approachable way to read about some of the most important issues facing studentsâ interpersonal relationships in school and how to deal with them. I wish this book existed years ago when I saw Jake turn the corner and grab the smaller student. Things may have turned out different if Jakeâs teachers, parents, and myself better understood the social power Jake wielded upon others, and what we could do to help him use such power in a positive way.
What Is the Purpose of This Book?
If you are currently part of a teacher education program, or graduated from a teacher preparation program, then you likely received training in a variety of pedagogical and methodological skills for how to teach students. You may have taken a course on classroom management as part of your training, but even classroom management courses do not always appear in all teacher training programs. You may hear current or former teachers tell you that classroom management is something that you acquire over years of teaching, and cannot really be taught. This is inherently untrue. Rather, classroom management is really complex with a room full of students coming from diverse backgrounds, having unique special needs, and even potential mental health issues. Each student comes to the classroom with unique problems, strengths, goals, and desires. These unique problems then interact with other studentsâ unique problems and issues. To complicate matters, you will often have little control over which students attend your classroom, but you will then be charged with teaching all students, while being judged by teachers and administrators in how successfully you can manage a classroom. Thus, having any training in classroom management is important. Having more classroom management training is even better as you learn more about how and why your students act the way they do in class.
Classroom management courses can be helpful, but classroom management classes typically spend little time explicitly on studentsâ interpersonal relationships. A course may spend some time on bullies, though in my experience such training is often incorrect and filled with ineffective advice (that bullies are just socially awkward and that bullies will stop simply by ignoring them). The need to understand studentsâ interpersonal relationships should be one of the focal points of any classroom management course. Understanding interpersonal relationships can help teachers understand why students fight with each other and explain the academic effects of friendships. Peer interactions can quickly become one of the best ways to inspire a classroom, but peer interactions can quickly deteriorate a quality learning experience into classroom chaos. Thus, understanding studentsâ social motives and how to intervene should be an important supplement to any classroom management course.
The bookâs purpose is helping address an important part of classroom management that often receives little attention in teacher preparation programs. Designed for preservice and practicing teachers, the bookâs content spans such topics as bullying, popularity, and social media. The book presents experts in the field discussing both real classroom examples, as well as the scientific basis behind their positions on how to handle classroom interpersonal relationships. Each expert speaks to one question pertaining to interpersonal relationships in classrooms, but the chapters share a similar format to each other so you can more quickly find the relevant information to you.
The Bookâs Organization
Besides the first, second, and last chapter, all other chapters include the same basic structure. Each chapter has five distinct sections. The first section is a real-life example or case study of the given chapterâs major topic. After the example, there is an introduction to why the chapterâs topic is important and how/why the topic occurs in school. The next section offers specific advice on how to handle the problem or help improve the situation. The fourth section provides a description of scientific evidence from existing research about the topic, which explains studentsâ behaviors and how to intervene. The final section discusses the limitations of current research and understanding as well as proposing future research that needs to be done on the topic. These five sections will appear in each chapter to provide consistency across chapters so that you can understand the major problem presented in the chapter, how to address the problem, and how evidence-based findings provide possible solutions to the chapterâs question.
Each chapter is then placed within one of four parts of the book. Each part is unique from the others by its context, but there is certainly theoretical overlap across parts of the book and chapters. The first part is simply an introduction to the book. This introductory chapter offers a purpose of the book and some basic terminology that appears throughout the book. The second chapter provides a general overview of how peer relationships are helpful and hurtful, with a particular emphasis on the psychological reasons behind why peers influence each other. The second chapter also includes some historical perspectives on how peer relationships affect classroom behaviors.
The second part of the book provides a wide array of questions pertaining to friendships in the classroom. These questions range from how kids with special needs develop friendships, to whether friendships are even academically beneficial. This section includes discussion about how you can identify and potentially influence friendships in your class. The second part also offers an in-depth examination of how friendships can evolve within your classroom into something that is helpful for both the students and you.
The third part of the book examines larger social concerns beyond friendships. This part provides useful information on bullying and being popular. This information is particularly helpful when trying to understand the social motives behind why students bully each other and why students want to be popular. The third part closes with a discussion on how social media plays an important role in how students acquire and use their social powers inside and outside the classroom.
The fourth and final part of this book offers concluding comments on peer relationships in school. This includes important limitations for what guidance experts can currently give on friendships, bullying, and interpersonal interactions in school. The conclusion also reminds us about the most important themes and concepts present across the bookâs chapters.
Who Will Find This Book Useful?
This book should be useful for both future and current educators. The book is written in a way so that material is approachable to non-experts and non-academic audiences. There is some jargon and terminology appearing in the book that you may be unfamiliar with initially, but nothing that is too particularly complicated. You should be able to understand key concepts and ideas pretty quickly. Later in this chapter, there are some definitions for important terminology that appears throughout the book so you will have a better idea of what to expect. The authors of each chapter understand that they are writing in a way so that concepts are clear and understandable so you can understand the content and hopefully apply it to your own classroom.
The content of the book is targeted toward current or future teachers working with students in early childhood through late adolescence. There are important differences in the peer relationships of a young child as compared to a teenager. Unfortunately, this book would become too long if examples and concepts pertained to each unique part of the lifespan. Instead, each chapter has a slightly different age group in its example, but many concepts are often applicable to any grade level or age level no matter whom you teach.
Future teachers and in-service teachers may find this book the most useful, but others may also find the chapters appropriate. Parents, educational administrators, school counselors, therapists, and school psychologists often wonder how friends, bullies, and other peer relationships affect learning, school experiences, clients, and their children. The book does not specifically address each of these important perspectives as the content is really designed for future and current teachers in handling their classrooms. Classroom management and peer relationships is often a complicated task in that teachers must manage instructional demands with classroom management. This is a different situation than when a parent is trying to understand bullying or a therapist working with a single client. Instead, the book should be approachable and useful to future and current teachers who want to know how peer relationships affect learning and studentsâ classroom experiences.
What Are Some Key Terms and Definitions for This Book?
Thankfully, most of the terminology in this book is fairly easy to understand without much prior knowledge. Other terminology has specific meanings and definitions, though the terms appear to be fairly common. Specific definitions exist so that everyone has a common and mutually agreed upon understanding of what a specific word or phrase might mean.
One important example of this is the word âfriend.â Most people would generally agree upon the definition of a friend, but this book uses a specific definition. A friend is someone that a person freely and mutually chooses to spend time with on some regular basis, though âregular basisâ may differ drastically for each friendship (i.e., daily, weekly, yearly). Friendships have to be reciprocated by both people, because a âone-wayâ friendship usually involves more admiration than mutual sharing of experience and feelings. A friend cannot be a family member because (1) family members are not freely chosen by the individual person (e.g., I did not get a vote in having a sister) and (2) family members have different relationships with you than friends (e.g., I share different stories and experiences with family members than I do with my friends). Friends are also different than romantic relationships, because intimate relationships have different experiences and norms than friends do (e.g., romantic relationships can involve physical contact that does not occur in friendships). Thus, friends are peers who mutually and freely associate with each other, share experiences, are not related, and are not in a romantic relationship.
When two friends spend time with other friends, then we see the emergence of a peer group. A peer group is simply a group of friends. A peer group may involve friends who are really close to you, but likely involves friends that are less emotionally tied to you. A good example of this is when I hear people say, âCould you call Ellen for me? Ellen and I are friends, but she is so much closer with you.â Peer groups usually have some common characteristic(s) among friends, which can range from simply growing up in the same neighborhood to having similar levels of religious beliefs or academic ability. When peer group members have similar beliefs, values, or hobbies (e.g., playing sports, favorite music groups), then it is called âhomophily.â Homophily is a very common aspect of peer groups. Indeed, peer groups usually form because the friends have and share similar ideals and personal interests. Peer groups usually tend to lose members, or dissolve completely, when members become too dissimilar to each other.
Peer groups are a nice way to describe how groups of friends coalesce together. Researchers in peer relationships often use the word peer group, but tend to avoid the word âclique.â A clique is usually described as a group of students that fall under a single category heading, such as the âjocksâ or the âtheater kids.â The use of the word clique gets used rarely by researchers who study peer relationships, but remains common among non-researchers (e.g., a high schooler says, âMy school is very cliquish.â). Clique is no longer an accurate description of how children and adolescents spend time together. To demonstrate this point, a common clique in American high schools are the âjocks.â Jocks include athletes from one or more sports. However, most athletes are not friends with the other athletes, even though they may be on the same team together. My schoolâs football team had many players who were not only not friends with each other, but seemed to really hate each other. Thus, it may not be accurate to say that students form into cliques. Rather, students associate with their peer group without regard to what other people call them.
Peer groups and friends exist within a much larger social network. A social network is the conglomeration of all other people that someone may come into contact with on a regular basis. For teenagers, their high school is often their social network. Children often have much smaller networks, such as their own classroom if they are in self-contained classes. Students may exist in multiple social networks if they partake in extracurricular activities, such as having a school social network and a social network at their ballet school. Generally, though, students only regularly interact with one social network.
Within a social network, students often try to gain popularity both within their group of friends and within their broader social network. Being popular usually involves being well-known within the peer group or within the larger social...