Encouraging Student Friendships

As we hear about increasing reports of people feeling isolated, making friends is more important than ever– and as an educator, you are in the perfect position to encourage friendships.

Students with friends are:

• More likely to be happy and well-adjusted
• Less likely to experience anxiety or depression
• More likely to succeed academically
• May motivate high school students enough to keep them from dropping out of school

As your students interact daily, you may gain a unique perspective on their interpersonal dynamics: who’s making friends easily; who needs help making friends; who’s feeling excluded; and who belongs to what clique. You can spark new friendships by helping students realize what they have in common by providing ways to get to know each other.

How Can I Help Students Build Friendships?

Try these techniques:

• Encourage ice breaker games to get to know each other. You may want to try our classroom conversation starters to get students sharing or other icebreaker activities. One simple activity is to have them meet someone in class that they don’t know well. Have 2-3 questions they ask each other and then have them report what they learned about each other.
• Designate a buddy bench. If there are benches near the playground where students have recess, point out one bench where new students, classmates who want to make new friends or children who want to play different games than usual at recess can sit. Tell your students that if they see someone sitting on the bench, they should invite them to do an activity together. Both students just might find a new friend. Make sure to keep an eye on the bench in case a child sits there for a while without anyone interacting with them. If that happens, approach some children from your class and encourage them to invite the child on the bench to play.
• Make your classroom more interactive. Provide opportunities for students to get to know each other and build trust. Periodically, have class-wide conversations to help students to learn things about each other that they otherwise wouldn’t know. An informal game or discussion at the end of class may also help students build connections. You can also change classroom seating arrangements to help them meet new classmates.
• Normalize conflict. Find a few moments outside of structured teaching time to talk about ways classmates should handle conflict, particularly if you overhear students arguing. Let students know that it’s possible to resolve conflict with patience, communication, compromise and finding common ground. Provide conflict scenarios to older students to get them talking and hear their perspectives.
• Assign group activities. When classwork could benefit from students talking amongst themselves, break your class into small groups. Decide which students should work together, instead of letting them pair up on their own. This is a great way to get students who have never interacted before to talk to new classmates. It’s also an effective way to help break up cliques. If students create study groups with new friends because of their classroom interactions, it may help them academically.

Encouraging student friendships shouldn’t take away from your teaching responsibilities, and it may have positive effects on your classroom dynamics and your students’ lives. As you interact with students and see them building friendships, you’ll want to watch out for bullying behaviors.