Strategies for Elementary Teachers to Guide Lower Grade Students in Building Positive Peer Relationships

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-497-6_8How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Elementary Teachers; Peer Relationships; Grounded Theory; Lower Grade Students

Abstract

Consider that approximately 10.5%-17.5% of students face peer relationship challenges due to difficulties in emotional regulation and aggressive behaviors, impacting their social development, this underscores the pressing need to provide targeted social-emotional learning and behavioral intervention support within the school environment. While teacher support has been shown to alleviate learning anxiety, improve school avoidance, and foster a positive classroom culture, research on intervention pathways for lower grade peer relationships remains insufficient. Based on grounded theory this study explores the pathways for building peer relationships among lower grade students through in-depth interviews with eight elementary teachers. The findings indicate that peer relationship issues primarily stem from individual traits, group dynamics, and third-party influences. Teachers can implement multi-path interventions. Firstly, they can design cooperative games and incentive systems as educational activities. Secondly, they can optimize physical spaces and enhance rule awareness as part of environmental systems. Thirdly, they can collaborate with parents and provide family support through home-school mechanisms. This integrated approach forms a three-dimensional model focusing on the “individual-group-environment”. Empirical evidence shows that teacher support significantly enhances the quality of peer relationships and reduces conflict behaviors. This model provides practical strategies for educators and holds significant practical value for promoting students’ social development.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ruiying Zhang
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/15
TI  - Strategies for Elementary Teachers to Guide Lower Grade Students in Building Positive Peer Relationships
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Educational Innovation and Information Technology (EIIT 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 66
EP  - 76
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-497-6_8
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-497-6_8
ID  - Zhang2025
ER  -