The Child at School

Interactions with peers and teachers, 2nd Edition

Peter Blatchford, Anthony D. Pellegrini, Ed Baines

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317538462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What is the nature of children's social life in school?
How do their relationships and interactions with peers, teachers and other school staff influence their development and experience of school? This book, written by leading researchers in educational and developmental psychology, provides answers to these questions by offering an integrated perspective on children's social interactions and relationships with their peers and teachers in school. Peer interactions in school have tended to be underestimated by educationalists, and this book redresses the balance by giving them equal weight to teacher–child interactions.

In this second edition, the authors extensively revise the text on the basis of many years of research and teaching experience. They highlight common misconceptions about children, their social lives, and school achievement which have often resulted in ineffective school policy. The book includes a number of important topics, including:

• The significance of peer-friendships at school
• The nature and importance of play and break-times
• Aggression and bullying at school
• Peer relations and learning at school
• The classroom environment and teacher-pupil interaction
• The influence of gender in how children learn at school.
• Advantages and disadvantages of different methodological approaches for studying children in school settings
• Policy implications of current research findings.

The Child at School will be essential reading for all students of child development and educational psychology. It will also be an invaluable source for both trainee and practicing teachers and teaching assistants, as well as clinical psychologists and policy makers in this area.

1 An introduction to the child at school

DOI: 10.4324/9781315726953-1

A personal introduction

The idea for this book began almost 25 years ago when one of us (AP) was spending the year at Sheffield University conducting research on children’s behaviour on the school playground. AP and PB had been invited to participate in a symposium at the university on bullying and aggression on the playground. After that day, and the subsequent evening in the pub, we each recognized the fact that children’s social lives in schools were both very important and very understudied.

Since that time we have collaborated on a number of projects, including a project on children’s games and their social relations, funded by the Spencer Foundation. Most centrally, our work has taken a developmental orientation on children’s social behaviour and relationships in schools. Over the past number of years we have participated in a number of symposia on both sides of the Atlantic and written numerous journal articles for psychological and education journals addressing the role of children’s social behaviour, especially during breaktime, in the lives of children at school.

Since the first edition, the authors have conducted extensive further research. PB has extended his work on peer interaction by co-directing a large-scale project in which a programme of collaborative group work in schools was developed and evaluated (the SPRinG project). We draw on this project and also two other large projects directed by PB, one on the effects of class size in schools (e.g., Blatchford, 2003) and another on the role and impact of Teaching Assistants in schools (e.g., Blatchford et al., 2012). PB and EB also directed a follow-up survey of breaktimes in schools, which we draw on in the book.

AP has also been extending his work in the areas of play, aggression, and development more generally. Specific to his work in play, he has helped to further clarify how object play is different from other forms of object use, such as construction, exploration, and tool use, and how play may actually affect phylogeny. His work on aggression and bullying has demonstrated how some bullies are socially competent, not deficient in social information processing, and how some forms of aggression relate to group stability, in the form of dominance hierarchies.

AP and PB are pleased that EB has joined us in writing this second edition of the book. He first joined us on the Spencer project and then subsequently worked with PB on the group work projects at the Institute of Education and also national surveys of breaktime/recess in UK schools.

The second edition has been substantially revised to reflect the many developments in the fields covered and to reflect material and insights from our research projects. The authors also draw on many years of teaching at undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels, as well as professional development work with teachers. We draw on these experiences and the feedback we received to further refine what we consider to be key applications of the research on the academic and social world of children and their peers at school.

Our ‘developmental' orientation

Our orientation to the study of children in schools draws extensively from the sub-fields of developmental, social, educational and evolutionary psychology. As we explain below it seems to us that research in these different traditions has tended to be conducted separately, and not always with knowledge of research in other areas. It is our aim in this book to offer a unifying perspective on interactions that draws on developmental, but also educational and social psychology, in order to inform both adult–child and peer interactions and relationships.

In this second edition we have expanded our discussion of development, per se, and consequently have drawn extensively from the evolutionary biological literature. Specifically, we stress a developmental perspective on children in schools because children are qualitatively different from adults and this perspective captures this distinction most directly. Below, we make a number of points about the way the term ‘development’ is understood and used. First though, we identify some other main themes in the book.

As the book’s subtitle states, an important theme of the book is a focus on interactions and relationships between and among people. We feel that interactions in school have tended to be considered by researchers in a fragmented way; for example, interactions between teachers and pupils have tended to be considered quite separately from research on interactions between children. Often the two types of interaction have been studied from very different theoretical perspectives and even disciplines.

It is probably true to say that developmental psychologists are not as familiar as they might be with research on classroom interactions – but, in turn, educational psychologists tend not to be familiar with developmental research on parent–child interactions and peer interactions. This is unfortunate because there are many conceptual and methodological overlaps between the two kinds of research, and much that each can learn from the other. Pianta (2006, in Hamre & Pianta, 2010) makes the strong assertion that the study of development in classrooms offers as much for developmental theory as it does for educational practice. He argues that the classroom environment should be of particular interest to developmental psychologists because: (1) there are important effects of daily interactions with adults and peers in schools on children’s development – after all, they are in schools for the majority of the day; (2) interactions in schools are as important as interactions with parents and in the home because they are intended to bring about developmental change; and (3) classrooms are often the location within which intervention programmes are implemented. Despite Pianta’s call, it is a salutary fact that the recent two-volume Oxford Review of Developmental Psychology (2013) does not have any chapters which examine pupils in classroom or school contexts.

Nevertheless it is possible to take the application of developmental psychology to schools too far. Hamre and Pianta (2010) have shown how, particularly in the USA, recent research on classrooms has drawn on research on processes in home settings, working on the assumption that there are underlying processes driving development, e.g., in the application of research on maternal sensitivity and effective parenting to research on teacher sensitivity and effectiveness. But Hamre and Pianta also point out that one needs to be careful about taking this application to an extreme because the home and the classroom are very different environments with very different dynamics, culture and interactions. In classrooms the driving rationale is the need to consider interactions in relation to school academic progress. So although the more recent interest of developmental psychologists in classrooms is, from the point of view of this book, very timely, it is important not to lose sight of the earlier longstanding research on classrooms and the interactions that take place there.

There is another reason why we feel the classroom is an important site for research in its own right. In preparing this edition it has become apparent that there has if anything been a decline over the past 20 years or so in close observational studies of what goes on in classrooms. Given the rich tradition of classroom studies, on which we draw in this book, this more recent trend is unfortunate and perhaps reflects the way school policy has become driven by econometric concerns with academic performance rather than close attention to the details of pedagogy and teacher–pupil talk. One aim of this book, therefore, is to champion the value of observational studies of children and their interactions in schools.

Observational methods are important because they enable us to describe in a systematic and rich way the everyday interactions children have with their social and physical environments. As we show in this book, the authors have possibly a uniquely extensive experience of direct systematic observational methods for studying children in different school settings such as the playground or the classroom (e.g., Pellegrini, 2012).

One thing that strikes anyone interested in interactions and relationships in school settings is that there is also a large literature that extends well beyond the realms of psychology, e.g., sociological, ethnographical and linguistic. This book differs from other texts which have focused on interactions in school contexts, because our approach is concerned with the psychological dimensions of these interactions and relationships.

But we are very mindful that all too often research and reviews of research situate themselves in silos of discrete subject knowledge, even when they are essentially interested in the same phenomena. It is probably beyond the space available to conduct a fully integrated text across disciplines, but in this book, despite the psychological orientation, we seek wherever we feel it is helpful to integrate material from different approaches, e.g., with regard to teacher–pupil interactions and sex differences in classroom interaction.

Children’s interactions and relationships with peers and adults are complementary. It seems to us that peer interactions in schools have tended to be underestimated, and sometimes discouraged by educationalists, and one aim of this book is to give equal weight to peer–peer and teacher–child interactions. In this book we seek to point out ways in which these two types of behaviours and relationship affect children in different ways. So, for example, adults may be effective at helping a child plan a shopping trip, but peers are much better at affording opportunities for children to use diverse functions of language. When preschoolers are playing, they use a wide variety of functions of language (Pellegrini, 1983) but when children are interacting with the teacher they typically are in the role of responder and reciter.

As well as the developmental approach, a main theme of this book is the adoption of a contextual approach. One widely known theoretical tradition seeks to interpret learning and development within ecologically meaningful environmental contexts (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Weinstein, 1991). Peer relations will take place in different contexts – out of school, e.g., at home or outside the home, as well as in school. Within the ‘microsystem’ of a school, there will be smaller within-school contexts, in particular the classroom and playground, which have qualitatively distinct sets of relationships, rules and dynamics that promote or hinder learning and social development. As we shall see there are also within-class settings, especially small groups of pupils, that can also be considered as distinct contexts with particular features and effects.

School environments are often considered purely in terms of settings for academic development. Of course, the classroom is a prime place for interaction, at least between children and teachers, and these interactions have a specific role in children’s academic development. But interactions between teachers and pupils have been considered in much research as if existing in a vacuum. In contrast, we consider some of the particular ways in which the classroom context can affect the nature of interactions between teachers and children. We also believe that other contexts in schools are important. In particular we have each spent much time researching children’s behaviour on school playgrounds, and consider this a neglected but important area. Indeed, we consider the school playground, and school breaktime, as one of the best places to study children’s social behaviour. Additionally, we also show how breaktime, and social behaviour on the playground, can be important to children’s academic and social skills.

Children can also be seen to interact with ‘context’ as well as with people. In this book we discuss ways in which contexts affect children; for example, when children are given doctor props with which to play, they typically engage in play which has a medical theme. On a more global level, children are embedded in classrooms and schools which have different levels of structure. In less structured, ‘open field’ situations, children may be free to choose their activities and partners. In this sort of context, children are likely to choose a friend with whom to interact and their interaction is likely to be cooperative, rather than disruptive.

Additionally, interactions with friends, compared with other classmates, around academic tasks are likely to be sophisticated and result in high performance. In more structured, ‘closed field’ situations, children do not have such a choice, and their interactions are less cooperative and in many cases less productive (Hartup, 1996). We also recognize that children affect contexts. By this we mean that children choose contexts which are consistent with their personality; for example, aggressive children choose other aggressive youngsters to play with, while shy children choose other shy children. As children continue to interact with each other they tend to re-enforce this similarity.

This interest in contexts for development has a broader connection with policy. Children may, for example, have a school friendship network which is quite separate from their out of school network. For some pupils it may be difficult to meet their school friends out of school. At secondary school level, students may travel some distance to school, often by car, and are unlikely to meet school friends, unless visits are arranged. This situation may be becoming more common with more market-led policies in education, when the encouragement of parental choice of schools can result in long journeys to the desired school, rather than the automatic choice of the nearest, local school.

There is another kind of context – this time not spatial but historical. Peer relations, and the contexts within which they occur, may be very different to the situation 10 or 25 years ago. There have been many complex social cultural changes over time and these will inevitably affect peer relations. To give an example: peer relations are now the focus of much media interest usually because of the widespread reporting of bullying, anti-social behaviour and violence between gangs in inner cities. There is a widespread sense of risk and threat from criminality and bad behaviour when children and young children meet when unsupervised. There is a general sense that behaviour has got worse in recent years (Blatchford & Baines, 2010). A recent submission to the Children’s Society national inquiry in the UK (2007) indicated that the number of teenagers with no best friends had increased over the past 16 years, while those who reported being assaulted or threatened by a peer had increased.

There are signs that these negative views about peer interactions affect parents of school-aged pupils and their decisions concerning the movements of their sons and daughters. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• 1 An introduction to the child at school
• 2 Children's social competence and peer relations
• 3 Pupil friendships in school
• 4 Children's play
• 5 Breaktime/recess in schools
• 6 Aggression in school: the specific case of bullies and victims
• 7 Peer relations and school learning
• 8 Classroom environments
• 9 Adult–pupil interactions in the classroom
• 10 Teacher expectations
• 11 Differences in classroom interaction in relation to gender
• 12 A concluding note
• Index