The Reseach Into Senior Students Informal Groups And Their Management Strategies

Informal groups in senior high school are common facts that can not be overlooked in the senior class and they play a very significant role in forming the styles of school,class and study and in cultivating students' behavior habits and values and in the improvement of teaching quality.As a consequence,it is worthwhile for the educators to study how to recognize,guide and educate informal groups and help them elaborate positive effect on the class.Senior one students have just gone through class-division of Liberal Arts and Sciences and senior 3 students are busily preparing for the coming entrance examinations for the university,therefore,this study targets at 432 senior 2 students at Bao'an Middle School(Group)of Shenzhen City and interviews 40 in-service teachers(1 grade director,20 head teachers and 19 subject teachers)and 10 parents and 20 students representatives.This study is about the empirical study and theoretical analyses of senior school students' informal groups by using questionnaire survey method,interview method and case method.Most importantly,this study provides several acceptable and practical educating management strategies for educating and managing senior informal groups.This study defines senior students' informal groups as spontaneously-formed groups in senior high schools as a result of such reasons as their similar interests,psychological needs and geographical relationship when senior students contact with each other.This study focuses on the forming reasons,types,characteristics and functions of senior school students' informal groups with the purpose of finally providing the strategies to guide and manage these groups correctly.There are two main causes of the formation of senior school students' informal groups,one is the internal causes and the other is the external ones.The internal causes include senior students' physical changes and their multi-level psychological needs such as the needs of feeling and belonging.The external causes include students' common time and space and the influence of their class,family and even the community around.According to whether the objectives of the informal groups are the same to those of the class,senior students' informal groups are roughly classified as such three categories as positive type,intermediate type and passive type.There are four main characteristics of the senior students' informal groups as follows:(1)being formed based on similar psychological characters and needs;(2)attaching importance to the feeling communication and information exchange;(3)having one or several role persons who have a strong influence;(4)playing not only positive but also negative effects.Based on the current situation of senior school students' informal groups,this study puts forward a set of acceptable and practical strategies as follows:(1)to recognize informal groups correctly;(2)to find out the forming reasons and pay attention to the target integration;(3)to treat informal groups differently and guide the role persons;(4)to build up communication system and pass on the positive information;(5)to strengthen the parent-school cooperation and form combined force of education;(6)to strengthen the network monitoring,and guide the students surf the Internet properly.The results of this study will help informal groups play a positive role and limit their negative impact and help to promote the styles of school,class and study.In addition,they are especially important to provide practical methods for head teachers in managing and educating their classes.