Teacher's role in facilitating good interpersonal relations between elementary students

This master's thesis deals with a teacher's role in encouraging interpersonal relationships among students. The theoretical part introduces concepts related to interpersonal relationships. This part also touches upon the history of studying relationships and a child's psychosocial development. A strong co-dependency of social and learning objectives has been found out. The ways in which a teacher can influence student relationships and enhance them in order to enable an optimum development of an individual have also been presented. The empirical part presents the results of the qualitative research, obtained using a semi structured interview. The research sample included six primary school teachers; three of them teach at the first educational period and the three other teach at the second or third educational period of primary school. The answers of the two groups of teachers were compared and analysed. The results showed that the teachers place great importance on interpersonal student relationships and a teacher's role in enhancing them. They believe they influence student relationships mostly by their personal class management and by setting an example to them. They also observe the connection between social and learning objectives, since students who are academically more successful also possess better social skills, and the other way around. The research indicated that the teachers systematically encourage student relationships mostly at the beginning of a school year, namely at the stage of getting to know the students, or upon the occurrence of a certain problem. They do that in different ways, such as peer to peer tutoring, social games, social skills development, or group work. Moreover, the results show that the teachers determine interpersonal relationships by conversation or observation. At this point, differences between first and second or third educational period teachers were observed since more teachers at the second or the third educational period use conversation as a method of relationships determination in comparison with the first educational period teachers. Differences also occurred in the knowledge of sociometric techniques, since only two teachers at the first educational period were familiar with the concept. I have also found out that teachers at the second or third educational period mostly help socially rejected students by conversation, while first educational period teachers emphasize the importance of student-teacher relationship, interpersonal cooperation and encouraging students' sense of safety. The research provides an insight into teachers' points of view on their role in establishing good interpersonal student relationships as well as ways to encourage and determine them. With this research I also wanted to stimulate teachers to consider their importance in building good relationships between students