Studies have shown that propinquity (proximity) is one of the biggest factors in people choosing their friends. If she has low self esteem large groups won't help her because it will be too easy for her to get "lost" in the crowd.

I agree with lidyax's advice, but I would add that you may want to try having the students work together on a project in small groups of two or three. (Four might be pushing the boundary because then the group may be reaching a size where someone can get left out and the group still be able to function.)

Once she gets comfortable with her partners and hopefully befriends them, she will have a little more confidence to face the rest of the group.

Good luck!
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Hmm...

When I was in university, my summer job was mapping hike trails so the government would know where to build hike-trails and campgrounds for areas of the country that they were still opening up for tourism, and part of the job was to lead around a bunch of scouts and ventures on long extended backpacking trips through the mountains in order for them to earn their chief-scout awards, and what I found was that if they started developing a pecking order, or if one of them was getting excluded, or if one of them was just shy, I developed a few simple methods over three summers that seemed to work most of the time:

1) If they started scrapping at each other and it looked like they might be forming a pecking order, I'd change the course of the hike to be strait up the difficult side of the mountain, such that they might have to tie on ropes and start rock-climbing, and stuff like that. I never told them it was discipline per se... but they figured it out really fast. The only pecking order was that I was in charge and they all had to follow equally.

2) If someone was being excluded or shunned, then at the end of each day, I'd always give him the trail-log journal and tell him that while the rest of us set up the camp, it was his job to write the daily trail log reporting where we'd been and what had happened. When the other kids would ask me why I did that, I'd tell them that it was because he would have the most objective perspective of what had happened throughout the day, having been on the outside.

3) If there was a shy kid, and we were in a situation where someone needed to scout ahead to look over a ridge or something like that, I'd send them to do the scouting. Initially, they tended to be the least annoyed or freaked at being seperated from the group, but also, if we were way back in deep country, they also tended to learn real fast that they were happy to be back with a group when they returned.
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