I read an interesting article last week on the growing achievement gap in schools between girls and boys. This prompted me to check our test scores and sure enough, in reading and writing KPBSD girls outperform the boys by a significant margin. Last year in math there was no difference in the average scores of the two. What was most striking to me is that this has been the case for several years. The article makes the familiar argument that schools are better designed for those who are nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, and studious. While there are plenty of boys who respond to this design, there are also plenty of boys who do not. What then, can schools do to better engage its boys?
The obvious thing is to do more to meet our students where they are at and not assume that with the right prompting all will move to a central location. While competition is shunned in some classes, it is likely that a portion of our boys will better respond to this sort of environment than they would to a collaborative one. If we are to truly meet our district goal of increasing student engagement through effective instruction, then we will have to recognize that the strategies used to engage will need to vary depending on the student. Although separating boys from girls for instruction at school is being challenged as illegal, it would be interesting for one of our schools to do this for the teaching of writing, the subject area with the biggest score difference. Boys dominate our discipline lists, there’s no reason why they can’t be neck and neck with the girls in all content areas.
3 Comments
It would be interesting to try out this concept within a single classroom. I envision having various “writing clubs” within a classroom, and while it wouldn’t necessarily have to be a boy/girl split, it sure could be a competitive/collaborative split. Of course it would have to be a year-long model and data would need to be collected and analyzed to see if it made a difference. This would bypass the “legalities” of gender-separate instruction. It’s something to think about.
thanks for the comment- I like the idea. I will be encouraging staff in the coming weeks to think about this issue and when appropriate, try some strategies that address the perceived reasons why the boys are not keeping pace with the girls.
A chief argument for separating girls and boys through elementary school has traditionally been that girls usually grow and mature faster until high school, when the
boys eventually catch up.
This makes girls usually more dominate, and the leaders, all through elementary school.