Seating plans - Essay Example

Seating plans define the arrangements that teachers prefer to use to organize their pupils in class for easier management and with the intent to nurture perfect or near perfect peer relationships. This brings us to another aspect of children’s growing life: Peer Relationships (Ladd, 2005). Peer relationships refer to the connections that individuals in the same age group have and thus the influence that may occur as a result of these relationships. Among children, these relationships have a major influence in their development stages in life as they constitute the major influence in their behaviors, attitudes, skills and other various life skills that later come in to influence an individual’s adaptations during their life span.

These relationships are very vital as they determine a child’s cognitive, emotional and social actions as the child undergo different growth stages in life. This is why when children aged between five and seven start attending school, their teachers should be very careful as to consider the factors that will ensure the children get good skills, and thus the aspect of seating arrangement comes in (Rose, and Rudolph, 2009). One aspect that the children’s teachers or handlers should ensure is that pupils with good relationships are close together while at the same time avoiding pupils with bad relationship sitting close together in a seating arrangement.

This arrangement will ensure that the influence of bad norms or vices don’t spread further among kids, rather, good behavior traits will further spread among the children considered good and the same will start spreading in the children with bad relationships. This plays an important part in children’s growth as the development skills they eventually develop are keyed towards the brightness of the children’s future (Hastings, and Chantrey, 2002). Research indicates that childhood peer relationships mostly occur around activities like play and other common doings associated to children.

This brings us to another point in this essay of discussing about why children always prefer to play with the same gender. A theory that was once proposed by Sullivan in his theory, the Sullivan’s Theory of Personality Development, there comes a time when children develop stronger ties with peers of same sex or gender. This aspect in a child’s growth usually comes as the child is more determined to find his or her well being among his or her peers. The research states that this stage provides a validation period where the child is able to find out how the rest of the peers would rate him or her in form of caliber the child contains, kind of a validation as referred to a short while before.

Incase this stage in a child’s growth is ignored, the child might not be confident enough in the future as he or she did not have the opportunity to know the competencies he or she had, or explained further simpler, didn’t have the opportunity to measure the acceptability he or she had from the peers as a small child. It is thus an important facet in the growth period of a child; the opportunity or choice of the child to play with same sex peer groups (Kernan, and Singer, 2011). Some of the advantages and disadvantages that would arise from predetermined seating arrangement by children handlers are here by outlined.

These will help us have a judgment of whether this is a good act in