Boys will be Boys

As part of investigating my own practice, I have been looking at the achievement data for my male learners when compared to those of my female learners. The difference is stark, my male learners underachieve, on average, by at least 10% when compared to their female classmates. So of course, I ask myself as to why? The common refrain from many of my fellow educators is "well, boys will be boys".

So I began reading. In particular, the following books. He’ll Be OK, Growing Gorgeous Boys Into Good Men, Celia Lashlie, 2006, Harper Collins Publishers., Reaching Boys Teaching Boys – Strategies that Work – and Why, Michael Reichert and Richard Hawley, 2010, John Wiley and Sons and I can learn from you – Boys are Relational Learners, Michael Reichert and Richard Hawley, 2014, Harvard Educational Publishing Group. 

The following blogpost is a distillation of what I have discovered during my inquiry into the differences I am seeing between the genders. Celia Lashlie, a former New Zealand prison officer, social justice advocate turned author who herself struggled with raising a teenage son came to the following conclusions in her book: 

• Maleness is about loyalty, effort, and belonging.

• Sport is an integral part of the journey to manhood because it is competitive and gives boys a sense of being part of belonging.

• This relates to loyalty being seen as a positive quality.

• Adolescent boys need time to think, time to process newfound emotions and time to make decisions about their future.

So what does this mean in terms of my interactions with the boys in my classroom? Well, I need to recognize their desire to live in the moment and their inability to plan their lives. I need to provide challenges and place high expectations on them and provide clear boundaries. Ms. Lashlie suggests that fear of failure keeps boys living in the moment longer instead of developing. So, with this, I need to appreciate that girls learn differently from boys but not necessarily better. Boys appear to develop resilience later than girls, the only really acceptable emotion adolescent boy feels able to display is his anger.

As a male teacher, I can help provide a positive male role model. Ms. Lashlie argues that as a boy matures he moves from being interested only in having fun and learning to feeling ten feet tall and bulletproof and everyone else is a loser to becoming a little bit more serious with time to play to finally a generous wise young man at graduation time. It is a process. My own observations support this view.

As a man myself, I realize that adolescent boys are pragmatists, just like me. The challenge is how to use it in a way that supports their development. To connect with boys and encourage him in making good decisions, I need to step into his timeframe (not can’t rush things). In their book, Michael Reichert and Richard Hawley argue that adolescent boys need to be able to know the consequences of doing or not doing something before it becomes real enough to matter and to motivate them. The pragmatic lens through which an adolescent boy looks is very narrow and only has room for himself – what’s in it for me!

The concept of male intuition is also considered. This is a highly developed skill that most men use without conscious awareness of exactly what they are doing. There is so much happening on the inside of a teenage boy that he can’t talk beyond the occasional monosyllabic grunt. According to the authors, about 80% of men’s communication is silent and if men are communicating with each other that ratio rises to 90%. So I need to recognize the communication that’s occurring and trust it, rather than insisting that everything is openly discussed. Something I already appreciate in the sports field.

So how do should I talk to teenage boys? Well, I find it effective to use I statements. For example: When you behave in this way, I feel annoyed and the effect on me (the class) is that it is disrupted so, in the future, I would like you to consider the appropriateness of your behavior before acting. Boys don’t need a lecture, they need reminding.

In the third book, Michael Reichert and Richard Hawley develop the idea that boys experience their teachers before they experience the lessons they teach. Relationships come before learning. Before instruction is completed, teachers have registered critical information through their physical presence, age, ease or tension, posture, tone of voice, and distinctive mannerisms. Within minutes students will sense a decidedly welcoming presence, or not.

They argue that to a greater extent, boys are relational learners. Establishing an effective relationship is a precondition to successful teaching for boys. The fundamental element is the establishment of trust. Boys elicit the kinds of teaching they need. Teaching boys have a feedback dynamic in which ineffective practices disengages boys, which causes teachers to adjust pedagogy until responsiveness and mastery improves. Lessons for boys have transitivity. Successful lessons have an element that arouses and holds students’ interest.

According to Reichert and Hawley, in this paradigm, the teacher assumes three responsibilities:

• To serve as the expert facilitating the student’s learning.

• To maintain an overall awareness of the alliance between teacher and student.

• To monitor and mend strains in the alliance.

They contend that, as we are the professionals in the relationship, teachers should not expect, nor should they wait for students to mend any strains in the working alliance. Boy's flourish when their teachers were:

• Effectively in charge.

• Positively concerned about the boys despite their poor performance or troublesome behavior. 

• Confident that better work and better behavior was possible and forthcoming.

Teachers’ clear mastery of their fields was the relational foundation stone, as was the maintenance of clear and even demanding standards of classroom conduct and quality of work (high expectations). So as a teacher I need to:

• Meet particular student needs.

• Respond to a student’s individual interests and talents.

• Share common interests and talents.

• Share common characteristics.

• Disclose personal experiences (in context).

• Accommodate a measure of opposition.

• Reveal some degree of personal vulnerability. 

Effective teachers combine mastery of the subject matter with the ability to convey it to others. Their own mastery, in a sense, is less central to them than enabling their students to attain similar mastery. At the heart of this dual accomplishment is a commitment to those they teach that impels them to devise, revise, and improvise pedagogy until they succeed in engaging their students.

In summary, by deepening my capacity to listen, extending myself in care, expressing delight or interest, exhibiting patience when my lessons are thwarted by that struggling student is the best approach to boost my male student's achievement. I must care about them to help them learn.