The social environment is an essential part of the human environment, with specific features and characteristics that living in society brings. A person's social integration, interpersonal ties, any interpersonal interaction determines a person and to a significant extent influences his behaviour and survival. For successful functioning in personal and professional life, it is important that individuals possess social competences, among other things. It is social competences that enable us to build healthy and positive relationships with others, to cooperate effectively, to resolve conflicts, to communicate our needs and feelings effectively, to improve interpersonal relationships and to prevent the escalation of problems or disputes. In the conditions of Slovakia, we have a large community of pupils from socially disadvantaged backgrounds in our schools. The overwhelming majority are Roma pupils. If they live in marginalised communities, their psycho-social development is lagging behind. Our aim is to bring them on a par with the majority population in the school education in the social sphere. That is why we are making stronger efforts to provide inclusive education for these pupils. Despite the joint education of Roma and non-Roma pupils, they are ignored in schools, they are not involved in school or extracurricular activities, and friendships between Roma and non-Roma pupils are not formed. For these reasons, it is necessary to improve their social skills in order to improve communication between the majority and the Roma minority. The aim of our paper is to present the intentions of our research endeavour, which has the ambition to improve the social-personal development of Roma pupils using cooperative teaching methods. In our research we will use a quasi-experiment, the parallel group technique will be used, i.e. experimental and control groups. The experimental intervention will manipulate the independent variable (use of cooperative methods) in the experimental group. Before and after the experimental intervention, measurement of the dependent variable - students' social skills and social relationships - will be conducted in both groups. The experimental intervention will be implemented in the months of November 2024 to April 2025. The sub-results in the form of baseline measurements showed significant differences in social skills and social relationships to the disadvantage of Roma pupils. We assume that after the completion of the experimental validation, the use of cooperative methods will lead to a significant improvement in the social competences of Roma pupils, which will allow them to assert themselves more significantly in future life in society.

Keywords: Cooperative teaching, pupil from socially disadvantaged environment, Roma pupil, inclusive education, social-personal development, social competences, social relations.