Psychological structure of the school class Leader, star, rejected isolated

In the psychology of a small group, it is customary to distinguish two basic structures of relations in a team: FORMAL (official) and INFORMAL (informal) - Formal structure is the ratio of the positions of the group members relative to each other, defined from the outside, not depending on the members of this particular group and about the same for all groups of this type. For example, in the team of teachers the formal structure will be the staff list that exists in the school. The element of the formal structure in the school classroom may be the position of the headman, some other posts that were designed for a school or classroom for a particular school or classroom.

Informal structure is a system of relations of its members to each other spontaneously arising in the process of group life activity. Informal structure can be purely emotional, that is, to reflect who is sympathetic to someone in the group, and who does not like someone. The informal structure may be based on other criteria (for example, attitude to a common cause or some other important moments for a group). It is essential that the informal structure is always the result of the interaction of specific people included in a particular team. Formal and informal structures, as a rule, do not coincide. If in groups of adults, both of these structures of relationships are usually approximately equally significant, then in children's groups informal connections are almost always more important for children. In the school classroom, the formal structure is almost absent, but informal relations play a very large role. As already mentioned, the informal structure of relations is the result of the experience of the interaction of group members with each other. Naturally, the informal structure does not arise simultaneously with the emergence of the group, but is formed gradually. Below we dwell on the question of the mechanisms of formation of the structure in a group - on the mechanisms of GROUP DYNAMICS. And first, let us deal in more detail with the informal structure of relations. Each group member has a certain place in the system of relations of community members with each other. This position can be called SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL STATUS. The status of any person in a team has its own specific parameters, but the whole variety of shades of relations between group members can be reduced to four most significant positions: stars, preferred (or popular), rejected and isolated. We decipher the essence of these categories on the material of the school class. The stars are the guys that are most popular among their classmates, everyone would like to be friends with them, to enter into the circle of these students. Preferred - such members of the class that have a fairly wide range of relationships with their classmates (note that this breadth can vary greatly in different classes). Rejected - students with whom the vast majority of children in the class do not want to do, but they themselves seek to communicate with classmates. And, finally, isolated - those guys who do not take the initiative in communicating with classmates, and those, in turn, do not have a pronounced relationship to them.

So, to assess the situation of the child in the classroom, as a rule, it is quite enough to attribute him to one of the four categories that have been identified. If the student has the status of a star or preferred class, then you can be sure that he has no special problems with classmates. If a child is rejected by his peers, he probably experiences serious problems in communication, experiences conflicts with his friends, which inevitably affects his mental state. The status of an isolated child can be experienced very differently by a child, but we can with a high degree of probability assume the presence of any psychological difficulties for this student.

To characterize relations in a class, it is essential to determine the status of each student, as well as the general status structure, i.e., how many disadvantaged children in the team (rejected by comrades or living isolated from them), how many stars and how much their social circle differs from connections averagely popular. It should be noted that there are serious age differences in the nature of relations between students in different classes. Below we return to the analysis of these age features.

To determine the status structure of the school class (as, indeed, many other groups), they often use the SOCIOMETRIC METHODIC. There are many different manuals on sociometry, where you can get acquainted with the details of its implementation and processing of results. So we will focus only on the most common points. What is a sociometric method? These are one or several questions in which the child is directly asked - with whom from classmates he would like to do any work, do some business, have some kind of relationship. The answer to this question are the names of classmates. For example: Write, please, with whom from classmates would you like to sit at the same desk? Or with which of your classmates would you go on a difficult trip? When formulating questions, it is very important to take into account the real interests of the children and correctly predict why they will choose certain partners for a certain type of activity. These questions in social psychology are called SOCIOMETRIC CRITERIA, or criteria of sociometric choice. They should be meaningful for children, so that their mutual evaluations are not random, but have some content.

In addition to the problem of formulating questions that are significant for schoolchildren when conducting sociometry, there is still at least one difficulty .. The point is that if this procedure is carried out by the teacher, then the children are rarely frank. High school students even barely hide their insincerity, and the little ones themselves do not always realize that they do not really want to reveal their secrets to the teacher. But, in our opinion, there is no big trouble in this, since in most cases the teacher absolutely does not need to conduct a sociometric survey in full. This is really a task rather for a school psychologist. The teacher has such a great experience in communicating with her class in everyday school life that all the necessary information needs only to be able to learn from this experience. For example, a teacher can classify students in her class into the four categories described above without conducting a special survey. To do this, you need to monitor whether your understanding of the relationship of children to each other is not replaced by your own assessments of children. And for control, you should contact one of your colleagues and compare your ideas with his ideas.

Special attention requires the position of the leader of the school class. First, we separate the concepts LEADER and STAR, which are quite often mixed together. A star is a member of the class that is most attractive to all classmates. Often these are seemingly cute, funny children who easily come into contact with other people, and communication with whom brings joy and pleasure to almost everyone. That is, the star belongs to the emotional sphere of relations, the sphere of sympathies and antipathies between children. The phenomenon of leadership is more complex and deep. If communication stars arise almost immediately after the formation of a class, the leader advances much later and is the result of group dynamics, accumulation of experience in joint affairs and experience of relations. It is hard to imagine a class in which there are no bright guys, communication with which is desirable for all classmates, however, quite a lot of classes in which there are no leaders. So what is a leader? The socio-psychological leader is the member of the group who has the strongest influence on classmates, is for them the personification of their class, the carrier of the core values ​​of this team. The star in the class is very easy to calculate, when you first meet the class, almost immediately the guys are singled out, to which the majority is drawn. However, they do not necessarily have significant influence, often this is not the case. But it is not easy to see who decides in class. With external observation, adults often make mistakes in assessing the influence of children among their peers. The main reason for these mistakes is that teachers (or other adults) often substitute the opinion of children with their own, and the evaluation criteria for classmates and their teachers, as a rule, differ greatly. There is a procedure close sociometric, to determine the class leader. These are questions aimed at ranking classmates according to the criteria for their contribution to certain types of joint activities. Unlike sociometric questions, in which the respondent assesses the degree of his own sympathy or antipathy, when ranking, each member of the class assesses which of his classmates is the most influential in a given situation.

The presence of a class leader can greatly facilitate the teacher's interaction with this team, and, conversely, can seriously complicate relationships. Influencing a group through a leader is one of the most effective channels of influence. After all, the guys themselves put forward this classmate in this position, the experience of their interaction led to the fact that they trust him and listen to him. If the influence of the teacher and the influence of the leader are unidirectional, the result will be favorable. On the other hand, if the teacher goes against the leader, tries to discredit him or compete with him, then the situation becomes more complicated. In the latter case, the teacher will face not one or another student, but the class as a whole, the children will have a feeling of encroachment on their class, on values ​​that are important for them (otherwise there simply would not be a leader in the class).

Let us turn from the problem of the individual status of the child in the group to the description of the socio-psychological structure of the group as a whole. Naturally, the types of structures can also be a great many. But at the moment we are interested in such kinds of relationships of children in the class, which can be a matter of concern for teachers working with them. We give the main examples of such dysfunctional relationships in the classroom. The first option is a case of no structure at all. Those. the group level of relations is practically not formed. At best, the guys are divided into pairs, the feeling of the class as something holistic is absent both among the students themselves and among the teachers working with them.

The second option is a folding structure. In the class there is a group, which includes a small number of children, and the rest of classmates exist by themselves. The most unfavorable is the case if this group opposes itself to the rest of the class. If the relations are neutral and rather positive, then there is a high probability that we are really talking about the initial stage of development of a class as a psychological community, the general laws of which will be discussed below.

The third type of possible school class structure is the presence of two or more competing groups of children in a class. This situation in the classroom is the result of a certain development of relationships, the change of which is very problematic. Each of the established groups has already passed its own psychological development, and the criterion of rallying in one subgroup differs from the factors that played a group-forming role for other children. The presence of such groupings leads to an atmosphere of hostility and competition in the classroom.

The given examples of the structures of relations in the class do not require special diagnostic techniques. They are fairly obvious to an outside observer (who is the teacher). It is more difficult to understand what caused the formation of a certain type of structure, which type of activity performed the grouping function for each grouping. But to answer these questions, unfortunately, there are no formalized methodological procedures. It is necessary to analyze the whole process of the dynamics of relations in the classroom.