ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with peer support practices in classrooms and the wider school. By ‘peer support’ we refer to those instances (usually planned and under the supervision or guidance of a teacher) where pupils are directly involved in organising and delivering experiences to help maximise some aspect of their peers’ functioning (i.e. their affective, social, physical and cognitive performance). This support, for example, may require pupils to listen to others read, to attend to them while they talk about their personal problems, to ‘teach’ some aspect of a curriculum area (e.g. chemistry, arithmetical computations), or to provide sympathetic support to someone who is encountering difficulty in adjusting to the demands of school. Whichever practice is employed, it usually includes a type and degree of interaction which is uncommon in classrooms which omit this support.
