While teacher-student relationships are important, educators and parents have realized the importance of student-student relationships.
Teachers in integrated settings realize that in order to compensate for the lack of opportunities for students with disabilities to form relationships with non-handicapped peers, situations must be set up in the classroom to encourage and teach disabled and non-disabled learners to interact.
The skills for working in groups, solving problems and tolerating differences can be learned by all students if they are invited to participate in classroom learning activities. We have observed that teachers have created a variety of ways to encourage such relationships.
DEVELOPING STUDENT-TO-STUDENT INTERACTION
Cooperative Learning
Cooperative learning is an effective strategy that provides opportunities
for students with disabilities to participate and build relationships with
their non-disabled peers. Cooperative learning involves structuring learning
tasks so that students work together in small groups to achieve shared
academic goals (Johnson, Maruyama, Johnson, Nelson and Skon, 1981).
Students are accountable and responsible for their own achievement, as well
as for the performance of the other members of their group. They also
practise social roles as they work to solve problems, learn new material
or create projects and documents.
Incentives are built into cooperative learning activities to encourage children in the group to work together to teach each other components of the lesson. By using criterion-refenenced evaluation, teachers can modify and individualize goals to fit certain students’ abilities without jeopardizing evaluation for the group (Campbell, Campbell, Collicott, Perner and Stone, 1988).
