Making friends at school can be tough

By Brian Smith

An interesting article that I ame across ....

When belonging matters most
Making friends at school can be tough

Josh Kelley
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 12, 2006 12:00 AM

Making friends in school can be a daunting challenge for many kids.

Cliques form. Students are bullied or fall victim to snobby kids they thought were their friends.

The social drama that unfolds on campus is more than just frivolous jockeying among immature kids, educators say.
advertisement


The relationships kids have with their peers have a major impact on their sense of connection to a school, which can affect academic performance.

"That feeling of belonging to something is huge," said Thea Hansen, principal at Kerr Elementary in Mesa.

A student's friendships will determine "how you're going to feel about your life for the next nine months in school," Hansen said.

For students coming from a rough home life, school is their only chance to be connected with others through relationships with teachers and classmates, said Daniela Ruiz, school counselor at Kerr.

"Kids come to school to find belonging, and they need that connection...," Ruiz said.

In junior high school, the simplest of things, like having the same lunchtime as older students, can make a kid's stomach churn.

Catherine Pletchette, a principal for 13 years at Poston Junior High in Mesa, said last year her school began to have students attend lunch by grade level, a strategy she had seen other junior high schools invoke.

"We really felt that it would help the seventh-graders in particular make the transition," Pletchette said.

The result: Fewer students made requests for schedule changes last year.

"Students just seem more comfortable eating with others their same age," Pletchette said.

When students have friends and interesting classes, they look forward to coming to school, she said.

Here's a link to another article showing the link between academic performance the social networks of students.

The Relationship of School Belonging and Friends' Values to Academic Motivation Among Urban Adolescent Students

CAROL GOODENOW Tufts University

KATHLEEN E. GRADY Massachusetts Institute of Behavioral Medicine

ABSTRACT. Students' subjective sense of school belonging recently has been identified as a potentially important influence on academic motivation, engagement, and participation, especially among students from groups at risk of school dropout. Students' friends also influence their academic motivation, sometimes negatively. In this study, the relationship among early adolescent students' sense of school belonging, perceptions of their friends' academic values, and academic motivation was investigated among 301 African-American, White/Anglo, and Hispanic students in two urban junior high schools. School belonging was significantly associated with several motivation-related measures--expectancy of success, valuing schoolwork, general school motivation, and self-reported effort. Students' beliefs about their friends' academic values were more weakly related to these outcomes. The correlations between school belonging and the motivation-related measures remained positive and statistically significant even after the effects of friends' academic values were partialled out. School belonging was more highly associated with expectancy for success among Hispanic students than among African-American students, and among girls than among boys.

THERE IS A GROWING CONSENSUS that academic motivation is not a purely individual, intrapsychic state; rather, it grows out of a complex web of social and personal relationships. As Weiner ( 1990 ) stated, "School motivation cannot be understood apart from the social fabric in which it is embedded" (p. 621). Students' associations with cultural and ethnic groups, their families, and their friends (especially in adolescence) are fundamental aspects of this social fabric. Another potentially important element of the social context is students' sense of belonging in the school or classroom, that is, the extent to which they feel