The more the merrier? Friendships and Dunbar’s number

Megan | May 22, 2024May 16, 2024

LESSON OVERVIEW

The main objectives of this advanced lesson on friendship are to:

• talk about social circles and friendship dynamics;
• watch a video about Dunbar’s number and discuss the social theory;
• reflect upon types of friendship and their challenges.

With this lesson, students discuss how they spend time with people from different groups (e.g. acquaintances, friends, loved ones, etc.), watch a video about a social theory and talk about friendship. They examine friendship situations and discuss their challenges. Students can also do an extra vocabulary activity.

WARM-UP

This advanced lesson on friendship starts with a warm-up where students look at different relationships and discuss how they usually spend time with each person. At this point in the lesson, you can ask students to do an extra vocabulary activity where they match halves to complete sentences about relationships. Then, they explain what the phrases in bold mean (e.g. nurture friendships, cut out toxic friends, inner and outer circles, etc.). 

VIDEO AND DISCUSSION

After the warm-up, students watch a video about Dunbar’s number, a social theory. Before they do, students predict what ‘150 people’ in this theory means. Following that, they watch the first part of the video and say to what extent their answer was right. After that, students discuss questions about their thoughts on the video and what they expect to see next. Then, they watch the second part of the video in which they talk about circles of people in everybody’s life in detail (e.g. 5 people, 15 people, 50 people, etc.), and name one person they know in each circle. Next, they discuss questions which explore social circles and friendships. 

MORE DISCUSSION

In this part of this advanced lesson on friendship, students complete statements about the topic (e.g. Friendships can/shouldn’t be based on mutual benefit.) with their opinions and give some details. After that, they analyse types of friendship (e.g. virtual friendship, childhood friendship, workplace friendship, etc.), outline an example and identify a potential challenge and benefit for each of them. Finally, students look at friendship situations (friendship imbalance, friends moving and changing interests) and answer questions about their challenges.

WORKSHEETS

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