Today, October 5, is World Teachers’ Day, a day to recognise the essential role teachers play in transforming education and to reflect on the support they need to carry out their work. This year, UNESCO marks the 60th anniversary of the 1966 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers, under the theme “Standing with teachers: 60 years of protecting the profession, advancing its status and shaping our futures.” In this context, research on how children learn through interaction and mutual support can also offer valuable insights for teachers and classrooms.
A recent article, “Children from six cultures reliably help their peers, but in different ways”, shows how children between the ages of 4 and 9 from different cultural backgrounds display striking similarities. Children in all the populations studied consistently helped their peers by providing information or instrumental assistance, and the ways in which they offered help changed as they grew older.
The six populations included children from very diverse contexts in Latin America, Africa and Europe.
Among the findings, we can highlight several key ideas that can continue to support our work in classrooms every day:
- Helping peers is a universal behaviour, influenced by social norms.
Here, it is worth highlighting how Vygotsky describes two lines of different origins in human development: elementary processes of biological origin and higher psychological functions of sociocultural origin. This makes fostering mutual help and solidarity through Successful Educational Actions (SEAs) particularly important.
- Spontaneous helping behaviour is universal among children from different cultures. Children are more likely to intervene when there is a need, and they adapt their strategies as they grow older, moving from direct practical assistance among younger children to providing information among older children.
Once again, we can highlight SEAs and the interactions they create, such as those developed through Interactive Groups.
- As children grow older, helping behaviours change and can be influenced by the social expectations, norms and practices specific to their cultural environment.
This makes it essential to work on and teach solidarity in order to foster spaces for help and mutual support.
- Children in all the populations studied helped more when their peers were experiencing clear difficulties than when they were able to complete the task on their own.
This newspaper has frequently published articles about helping among students with and without special educational needs, highlighting, based on scientific evidence, how inclusive and interactive environments foster this kind of support.
The findings of the study confirm the importance of helping others by providing children with broad opportunities for social learning, which are crucial for becoming valuable and competent members of their social groups.
This article was first published in Periódico Educación on October 5, 2026.
Teacher of Speech and Language and Early Childhood Education. Participant in the Valencia seminar “A muscles de gegants.”