School organization

 can create policies or systems that could support social relationships and peer support for children with disabilities such as: peer tutoring, friendship groups, encouraging cooperative learning in the classroom and promoting peer buddy systems.

Peer tutoring is whereby students get one-to-one instruction on a particular topic, assignment, or skill by a classmate, a peer, or an older student. Additionally, peer tutoring programs can use fixed roles for students or allow them to alternate between tutor/tutee roles. Furthermore, peer tutoring is especially effective in incremental learning, in which there is one correct answer that the tutor is able to guide the tutee toward.

The school can create friendship groups whereby lunch, recess, or after-school groups explicitly designed to bring together students with disabilities and their peers for socialization and fun. This will work especially well when inclusion is minimal or if a student with disabilities is new to a school. The friendship groups may meet weekly around specific themes like the homecoming dance or school grounds improvement. Friendships groups are good opportunity to build social relationships and provide informal support channels for students with disabilities.

Schools can encourage cooperative learning in the classrooms whereby students work in small, mixed-ability groups and support each other’s learning. Competition within the classroom is deemphasized in favour of cooperation, mutual support, and shared accomplishments. Since all group members work together toward a shared goal; group is successful only when each member achieves the goal.

School can promote the peer buddy systems since peers provide incidental teaching during nonstructured, routine classroom activities. Many buddy systems in lower grades emphasize increasing and improving a student’s communication with peers.