The Importance Of Personal Development And Group Cohesion Within Young Learners Classroom

Abstract

The paper The importance of personal development and group cohesion within young learners classroom highlight the importance of interaction between personal development and group cohesion expressed through the quality of interpersonal relationships in the classroom with respect to the formation and development of the young learner personality. The general purpose of the research was to identify and apply some types of intervention: practices, techniques, methods and strategies, which help increasing the acceptance level of inter-individual differences among students and as well fostering tolerance towards colleagues in order to increase the group cohesion. To conduct this research which lasted for a whole year, we choose 26 first grade students from "L-R" Secondary School - Bucharest. The reached conclusion reinforces the idea that mixing personal development activities with other activities seeking to improve social perception or affective homogenization will significantly contribute in increasing group cohesion, reducing conflicts and improving school performance. These mixed activities must be simultaneously implemented with personalized intervention plans for students with behavioural disorders and/ or deficiencies. Personal development activities have benefits on the two dimensions of classroom: individual (especially in the case of children with problems, whose position within classroom it has shown to have improved) and collective (fact expressed by the group cohesion, effective communication skills, avoiding the labels and stigmatisation, increasing the degree of adaptation to the requirements and norms of the educational environment, behaviours that contribute to achieving their well-being).