Peers and Peer Groups

Mr. Riley feels increasingly annoyed and angry, but in an attempt to keep the rest of the class on task, he placates George by responding in asides to his remarks and questions. Finally, George makes a comment about the weight that each pioneer wagon pulls and the total weight the group must pull. Mr. Riley recognizes that George is applying ideas he learned in mathematics, and he is impressed; however, by this point, he is too frustrated to engage with George about his observations, so he ignores the comment. George throws his notebook across the room, effectively ending the class discussion for everyone.

As you can see, Mr. Riley misses, or can’t develop, a learning opportunity that might engage and empower a student struggling with challenging behaviors, and he doesn’t give that student a chance to lead his peers because he directs his energy at mitigating the challenging behaviors themselves. Mr. Riley doesn’t have an approach to move beyond damage control, and not having an approach results in frustration for him, his challenging student, and the entire class.

Students with challenging behaviors are included within general education classrooms the majority of the time. However, historically, the education of students with challenging behaviors was viewed as the responsibility of special educators, even if these students were not eligible for special education. In the late 1990s, educators began to see a shift toward proactive systemic approaches that were modeled by response to intervention (RTI; Buffum, Mattos, & Malone, 2018; Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, 2010) and positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS; Horner & Sugai, 2015) frameworks. In the 2020s, educators see these same proactive approaches and consider them to be multitiered systems of support.

Specifically related to shaping student behaviors, PBIS is a framework that emphasizes the use of data-driven, positive, evidence-based practices to decrease challenging behaviors among students and, in effect, increase academic engagement (Center on PBIS, 2022a). In later chapters, we will go into more detail on PBIS and on how the framework can help students who have behavior challenges like George’s.

Students try to figure out how they are valued within a peer group (Farmer, Reinke, & Brooks, 2014). For example, some peers are valued for being funny, and some are valued for being popular. Some of these students are viewed as funny and