Should we plan differently for boys’ and girls’ learning?

My first thoughts here would reflect most of the comments from Twitter: don’t plan differently. Instead, plan a range of tasks, provide a range of resources and language and use a classroom layout which gives pupils choices in how they learn and the permissions to use them. However, there are differences in how a girl’s and a boy’s brain is set up which perhaps can be exploited. Dr. Carolyn Jackson points out that girls and boys are not homogenous groups.Treating them as such may well re-enforce gender stereotypes. She also points out the importance of engaging parents.

Looking at a range of research and different, but in many ways, parallel, information on single sex education, I haven’t changed my original  view and in many ways it has reinforced my thinking, which goes like this:

A. Get to know your pupils. Boys and girls. Understand what makes them tick as individuals. Especially your most vulnerable pupils, who may come to your class presenting the most difficult problems. A minute of your time for PP pupils and a smile and sensible encouragement (not over-praise) could mean the difference between that pupil learning through the day and not, as they will carry it with them: kindness is the key to all great classrooms and is the bedrock of great leaders. A climate of trust will allow girls to see you as an ‘ally’ and boys to take the space they need to learn.

B Set a climate for learning which is friendly to all, but allows both choice of how to learn and the permissions to be able to exploit those resources to the full. Only take the permissions and choices away when you need all pupils to concentrate on you and your and excellent subject knowledge, but you are a facilitator in their learning and though your subject knowledge and facilitation skills, your pupils will learn best. Your classrooms do not have to be serried rows. Pupils still learn in a gym, or in a drama studio, where there may be no chairs!

C Give feedback which is useful to your pupils. Don’t let marking dominate. Feedback is far better if it is immediate; i.e. oral, or written feedback in the lessons. Differentiate this feedback by contextualising for girls and giving concrete examples for boys. When you comment on HW, expect more comments back from pupils. With all your comments, even if it is simply a spelling correction, expect your pupils to develop ways of incorporating that correction in their own ways, to improve their work (e.g. highlighting your comment/correction and highlighting where they’ve used the word correctly in future work). Save yourself work by expecting more of your pupils.

D. Be gender-open. Don’t compartmentalise. Yo have boys and girls in your class, but you will almost certainly also have LGBT pupils who don’t easily fit either gender stereotype. Subtle hints to the whole class that yours is a gender-open classroom, where everyone is encouraged, regardless of their sexuality, or B/G learning style, will support all in developing their own ways of learning.

E Set HW which promotes different ways of responding to your question, so both boys and girls can respond in their own way. Try flipping your classroom (e.g. and follow @ChrisWaterworth – primary – and @kimThomasLee in secondary) so pupils really can research and prepare in their own ways.

F Bring parents into the learning. They know their LGBT’s, boys, girls, SEND, PPs far better than you do (usually!). They know their individual needs/pressures, how they learn and they know what can help them. Let them see you as an ally and use their knowledge. Don’t just talk with them at parents’ evenings. E.g. let them have access to the VLE, so they can be aware of what is expected on a HW task. Put up boards outside primary classes saying what you’ve been learning today. Call every parent in your tutor group once a month and pass on info to class teachers.

G. Now it’s up to you. Research this further. You know your own classroom and classes better than anyone. Take what you can from the information below (I’ve cut and pasted a few interesting things but you don’t need me to point you. Teachers can sort their own PPD and google and Twitter are your friends!

That’s my summary. Below is a ‘scratch the surface’ of some articles and research. You’ll find that it evidences Michael Gurian’s work a great deal and much of the research is American. The video from Dr Carolyn Jackson is very watchable, but doesn’t come to hard and fast conclusions about single-sex ed. 

@mrscientist on Twitter put me onto this and I’m grateful, as it provided a catalyst for further research

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/nov04/vol62/num03/With-Boys-and-Girls-in-Mind.aspx

November 2004 | Volume 62 | Number 3
Closing Achievement Gaps Pages 21-26

Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens

The Minds of Girls

The following are some of the characteristics of girls’ brains:

• A girl’s corpus callosum (the connecting bundle of tissues between hemispheres) is, on average, larger than a boy’s—up to 25 percent larger by adolescence. This enables more “cross talk” between hemispheres in the female brain.
• Girls have, in general, stronger neural connectors in their temporal lobes than boys have. These connectors lead to more sensually detailed memory storage, better listening skills, and better discrimination among the various tones of voice. This leads, among other things, to greater use of detail in writing assignments.
• The hippocampus (another memory storage area in the brain) is larger in girls than in boys, increasing girls’ learning advantage, especially in the language arts.
• Girls’ prefrontal cortex is generally more active than boys’ and develops at earlier ages. For this reason, girls tend to make fewer impulsive decisions than boys do. Further, girls have more serotonin in the bloodstream and the brain, which makes them biochemically less impulsive.
• Girls generally use more cortical areas of their brains for verbal and emotive functioning. Boys tend to use more cortical areas of the brain for spatial and mechanical functioning (Moir & Jessel, 1989; Rich, 2000).

The Minds of Boys

What, then, are some of the qualities that are generally more characteristic of boys’ brains?

• Because boys’ brains have more cortical areas dedicated to spatial-mechanical functioning, males use, on average, half the brain space that females use for verbal-emotive functioning. The cortical trend toward spatial-mechanical functioning makes many boys want to move objects through space, like balls, model airplanes, or just their arms and legs. Most boys, although not all of them, will experience words and feelings differently than girls do (Blum, 1997; Moir & Jessel, 1989).
• Boys not only have less serotonin than girls have, but they also have less oxytocin, the primary human bonding chemical. This makes it more likely that they will be physically impulsive and less likely that they will neurally combat their natural impulsiveness to sit still and empathically chat with a friend (Moir & Jessel, 1989; Taylor, 2002).
• Boys lateralize brain activity. Their brains not only operate with less blood flow than girls’ brains, but they are also structured to compartmentalize learning. Thus, girls tend to multitask better than boys do, with fewer attention span problems and greater ability to make quick transitions between lessons (Havers, 1995).
• The male brain is set to renew, recharge, and reorient itself by entering what neurologists call a rest state. The boy in the back of the classroom whose eyes are drifting toward sleep has entered a neural rest state. It is predominantly boys who drift off without completing assignments, who stop taking notes and fall asleep during a lecture, or who tap pencils or otherwise fidget in hopes of keeping themselves awake and learning. Females tend to recharge and reorient neural focus without rest states. Thus, a girl can be bored with a lesson, but she will nonetheless keep her eyes open, take notes, and perform relatively well. This is especially true when the teacher uses more words to teach a lesson instead of being spatial and diagrammatic. The more words a teacher uses, the more likely boys are to “zone out,” or go into rest state. The male brain is better suited for symbols, abstractions, diagrams, pictures, and objects moving through space than for the monotony of words (Gurian, 2001).

American research again, next and focussed on younger pupils, but there are clear applications to secondary. 

How Boys and Girls Learn Differently Dr. Gail Gross @DrGailGross

Article in The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-gail-gross/how-boys-and-girls-learn-differently_b_5339567.html

So what can we do to help boys and girls have a happy, fulfilling, well-rounded, and successful school career?

• Be certain that your child’s school has a recess program that includes unstructured playtime.
• Be careful to not label children, especially with labels such as ADD and ADHD, unless they are diagnosed by a health care professional. Many boys and some girls are just on the outer edge of active and are being mislabeled.
• Encourage girls to play with toys and activities that allow them to use their spatial relationship and manipulation skills.
• Encourage boys to take study breaks and allow your son to be active during those study breaks.
• Help your daughter talk through her feelings about schoolwork and school problems. Because girls may focus on communication, relationships and attention for approval, they can easily get caught up in an intense emotional experience. Often a girl will subvert her own feelings, including needs, to get the approval of others and this causes self-esteem issues.
• Engage your daughter in sports to help her build confidence.
• Help your son with literacy skills, including reading, writing, journaling, drawing, creativity, fantasy, humor, war and mythology. Boys are action-oriented, often competitive and impulsive risk-takers, so giving them an opportunity to express themselves creatively and explore their interests is very important. This will help connect their words to their feelings and validate both.
• Offer your daughter the opportunity to experience STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) using everyday examples. By having access to a computer, girls can build, design, and explore anything from architecture, medicine, engineering to culinary experiences. You can also enroll your daughter in one of the many STEM programs around the country.
• Make sure teachers understand the different learning styles of boys and girls so that they are able to create a learning environment that meets the needs of both, by teaching different modalities that capture girls’ needs for spatial learning practice, including geometry, and boys’ needs for enrichment projects.

Again, from Gurian and Stevens 2004 (link above):

The Nature-Based Approach

In 1996, the Gurian Institute, an organization that administers training in child development, education, and male/female brain differences, coined the phrase nature-based approach to call attention to the importance of basing human attachment and education strategies on research-driven biological understanding of human learning. We argued that to broadly base education and other social processes on anything other than human nature was to set up both girls and boys for unnecessary failure. The institute became especially interested in nature-based approaches to education when PET scans and MRIs of boys and girls revealed brains that were trying to learn similar lessons but in widely different ways and with varying success depending on the teaching method used. It became apparent that if teachers were trained in the differences in learning styles between boys and girls, they could profoundly improve education for all students.

Between 1998 and 2000, a pilot program at the University of Missouri—Kansas City involving gender training in six school districts elicited significant results. One school involved in the training, Edison Elementary, had previously tested at the bottom of 18 district elementary schools. Following gender training, it tested in the top five slots, sometimes coming in first or second. Statewide, Edison outscored schools in every subject area, sometimes doubling and tripling the number of students in top achievement levels. Instead of the usual large number of students at the bottom end of achievement testing, Edison now had only two students requiring state-mandated retesting. The school also experienced a drastic reduction in discipline problems.

Statewide training in Alabama has resulted in improved performance for boys in both academic and behavioral areas. Beaumont Middle School in Lexington, Kentucky, trains its teachers in male/female brain differences and teaches reading/writing, math, and science in separate-sex classrooms. After one year of this gender-specific experiment, girls’ math and science scores and boys’ Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) scores rose significantly.

The Nature-Based Classroom

Ultimately, teacher training in how the brain learns and how boys and girls tend to learn differently creates the will and intuition in teachers and schools to create nature-based classrooms (see “Teaching Boys, Teaching Girls” for specific strategies). In an elementary classroom designed to help boys learn, tables and chairs are arranged to provide ample space for each child to spread out and claim learning space. Boys tend to need more physical learning space than girls do. At a table, a boy’s materials will be less organized and more widely dispersed. Best practice would suggest having a variety of seating options—some desks, some tables, an easy chair, and a rug area for sitting or lying on the floor. Such a classroom would allow for more movement and noise than a traditional classroom would. Even small amounts of movement can help some boys stay focused.

The teacher can use the blocks area to help boys expand their verbal skills. As the boys are building, a teacher might ask them to describe their buildings. Because of greater blood flow in the cerebellum—the “doing” center of the human brain—boys more easily verbalize what they are doing than what they are feeling. Their language will be richer in vocabulary and more expansive when they are engaged in a task.

An elementary classroom designed to help girls learn will provide lots of opportunities for girls to manipulate objects, build, design, and calculate, thus preparing them for the more rigorous spatial challenges that they will face in higher-level math and science courses. These classrooms will set up spatial lessons in groups that encourage discussion among learners.

The Journey to Excellence (Scotland) brings out these differences between boys’ and girls’ learning:

http://www.journeytoexcellence.org.uk/resourcesandcpd/research/summaries/rsgenderineducation.asp

‘Differences at school

The realisation that boys and girls think and learn differently has come from a range of sources, including research on the brain. Research into gender differences allows us to contrast some of the typical classroom characteristics displayed by boys and girls.

• Girls tend to be able to plan and organise their work more effectively than boys. They are also more able to apply their skills to different learning contexts.
• Boys interrupt more frequently and answer more often, even when they do not know the answer. Girls talk less in class and in groups but they are more likely to ask for help.
• Boys tend to over-estimate their academic abilities. Girls generally underestimate their abilities and work harder to compensate.
• Boys tend to act first and think later. Girls like to think before they act and they are slower at becoming involved in practical activities than boys.
• Girls are prepared to be more open about their aspirations than boys.’In addition, The Journey to Excellence suggests strategies to promote boys’ learning, but I would counsel caution with some e.g.providing ‘boy-freindly’ books – surely most books are gender neutral? Or is that me projecting my own feelings?)

Developing thinking in boys

Boys tend to act first and think later, unlike girls who spend more time thinking beforehand about tasks and activities. Many schools are developing thinking skills in young people and this can be particularly helpful for boys.  Using templates or concept mapping techniques, for example, to help develop critical or creative thinking skills can lead to more effective learning.

Self-confidence, perseverance and being willing to take risks and respond to new challenges are important factors in developing thinking skills in all learners. An increasing number of schools make use of techniques that help to extend pupil thinking through discussion and working with others. These include:

• Cooperative Learning
• Peer Teaching and Mentoring
• Brainstorming
• Buzz Groups
• Think-Pair-Share
• Rainbow groups
• Twos to Fours
• Listening Triads
• Critique Sessions.

These techniques are explored in more detail in the Learning Together section of Teaching for Effective Learning

So, should we set our curriculum/schools up to be single sex? 

http://www.singlesexschools.org/research-learning.htm

”Because girls do better in school (as measured by report card grades), one might imagine that girls would be more self-confident about their academic abilities and have higher academic self-esteem. But that’s not the case. Paradoxically, girls are more likely to be excessively critical in evaluating their own academic performance. Conversely, boys tend to have unrealistically high estimates of their own academic abilities and accomplishments.

Source: Eva Pomerantz, Ellen Altermatt, & Jill Saxon, “Making the grade but feeling distressed: gender differences in academic performance and internal distress,” Journal of Educational Psychology, volume 94, number 2, pages 396-404, 2002.

We arrive at one of the most robust paradoxes teachers face: the girl who gets straight A’s but thinks she’s stupid and feels discouraged; the boy who’s barely getting B’s but thinks he’s brilliant. Consequently, the most basic difference in teaching style for girls vs. boys is that you want to encourage the girls, build them up, while you give the boys a reality check: make them realize they’re not as brilliant as they think they are, and challenge them to do better.’

Professor Carolyn Jackson talks lucidly about single sex schools, saying that; more important than single sex, is social background and ability levels of the intake. 

http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/edres/videos/jackson_single-sex_schools.htm

http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/edres/videos/jackson_single-Sex_Classes.htm