Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys

Strategies that Work -- and Why

Michael Reichert, Richard Hawley

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470651520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Based on an extensive worldwide study, this book reveals what gets boys excited about learning

Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys challenges the widely-held cultural impression that boys are stubbornly resistant to schooling while providing concrete examples of pedagogy and instructional style that have been proven effective in a variety of school settings. This book offers more than 100 detailed examples of lessons that succeed with male students, grouped thematically. Such themes include: Gaming, Motor Activities, Open Inquiry, Competition, Interactive Technology, and Performance/Role Play. Woven throughout the book is moving testimony from boys that both validates the success of the lessons and adds a human dimension to their impact.

• The author's presents more than 100+ specific activities for all content areas that have proven successful with male students
• Draws on an in-depth, worldwide study to reveal what lessons and strategies most engage boys in the classroom
• Has been described as the missing link that our schools need for the better education of boys

PART One

Effective Lessons

Teachers from the participating schools were asked to select and narrate what they believed to be an especially effective instance of teaching boys—a specific lesson, an extended unit of study, or a particular approach to an assigned task. We formed no hypothesis about the responses we would receive, determining instead to see what, if any, patterns might emerge from each school’s responses and from the submissions taken together.

As it happened, teachers’ submissions as a whole revealed clear and distinctive features, some of them surprising. Perhaps the most pronounced feature was the remarkable similarity in what a wide variety of teachers found effective in their teaching.

As might be expected from a large, unselective sample of teachers representing all scholastic disciplines, some of the narratives were nuanced and eloquent, others terse. The very few teachers who announced themselves as traditional with respect to pedagogy tended then to present a notably imaginative and untraditional example of effective practice. In the parlance of educational theory, many of the submissions might be labeled “progressive” or “constructivist,” although none of the submitting teachers identified themselves in this way. The language of the narratives was largely free of theoretical educational jargon, though there were a few references to “assessment rubrics” and “scaffolded sequences.” Many of the submissions included frank and self-effacing admissions, including references to classes and approaches that had, with the exception of the reported practice, not gone well—classes in which teachers found their students unresponsive or difficult.

PRODUCTIVE PARTNERSHIPS

The boys’ submissions strongly supported what their teachers reported. As we read through the responses of both groups, it became clear that respondents wrote in their own vernacular—teachers in the language of lesson planning and boys often in that of electronic media. In asking them to describe a school experience that had been successful, we evoked teachers’ pride in their craft and boys’ fondest memories of their teachers, schools, and studies.

The stories we collected suggest that teaching boys effectively can be likened to a dance, an intricate partnership: although someone leads and another follows, this is a partnership of both people united in common purpose.

ACTIVE LEARNING EMPHASIS

Taken together, the responses combine to suggest a powerful endorsement of active, project-centered learning: boys on their feet and moving about, working individually, in pairs, and in teams to solve problems, create products, compose presentations to their classmates who are held accountable for the material presented. There is no reason to suppose that the reporting teachers did not otherwise engage effectively in more traditional kinds of instruction, such as lecture presentations and Socratic question-and-answer exchanges, but virtually none of the reporting teachers selected such lessons as “especially effective” or “best.”

Men and women teachers, as well as beginning and seasoned teachers, reported strikingly little difference in the kinds of teaching they found effective. Also notable was the similarity in reportedly effective approaches to students of different grade and ability levels.

EFFECTIVE LESSONS: FORMATIVE OR MERELY FUN?

Teachers were asked if the effectiveness of the practice they reported had been measured or whether it could in principle be measured. A sprawling variety of responses emerged. Many of the lessons reportedly resulted in measurably improved results on classroom exams and standardized tests. Other practices, especially those resulting in an artistic composition, lay outside standard metrical assessment. The dominant note struck in the responses to the question of measurability—struck with special fervor by teachers of analytical disciplines, such as laboratory sciences, mathematics, and social sciences—was that measurability aside, the affirming feature of the reported practice was the visibly high engagement of students in their assigned tasks and their warmth of response. Several of the reporting teachers took pains to point out that years later, students indicated the formative impact of the lesson selected.

Nevertheless, a skeptical response might fairly be made to the effect that practices felt to be engaging and energizing to teacher and boys are not necessarily educationally formative. Creating products, engaging in open-ended research, competing, game-playing, and introducing classroom novelties and surprises may be memorable and fun but perhaps not improving. This line of criticism is valid if it can be shown that engagement and enjoyment were the sole aim and ultimate result of the practice in question. As the teacher narratives in the chapters in Part One make clear, however, diversion and easy engagement are far from the aim or the result of their effective efforts.

THE UBIQUITY OF TECHNOLOGY

A word perhaps might be said at this point about information technology (IT)—computer-related school activity in particular. Information technology has been a steadily evolving and increasing presence in schools worldwide—clearly so in the schools participating in this study. Classroom PowerPoint presentations, interactive whiteboards, sophisticated information searches, global positioning applications, software specific to mathematics computations, animation, and historical simulations are not only in wide use in the schools participating in this study; in many cases, the technology itself is claimed to be central to the effectiveness of lessons. Some teachers make the further claim that ready engagement and facility in IT are specifically appealing to boys. A good deal of additional evidence and analysis are required to make a persuasive case that IT is in some way boy specific in its effects, but the prominence of technology applications is a consistent feature in the teachers’ accounts of their most successful lessons.

CHAPTER 1

TRANSITIVITY AT WORK

Five Effective Lessons

Neither the reporting teachers nor the boys found it difficult to identify what they felt worked for them in the lessons they selected as especially effective. Across academic disciplines, teachers and students reported elements of instruction that carried the intended points and resulted in understanding and mastery on the boys’ part. These conductive elements are what we call the transitive factor in a lesson’s effectiveness.

To illustrate this transitivity at work, we have selected five lessons from different academic subjects to highlight in this chapter. The students in these classes range from middle schoolers to older high school boys. Although not all of these classes are tracked by ability level, the boys in them range from modest to high aptitude. The reporting teachers represent schools in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and their years of teaching range from three to thirty-eight.

We selected these lessons on the basis of their variety and because they seemed representative of the tone and substance of the larger sample, many examples of which follow in the succeeding chapters. These five lessons were emphatically not selected because we thought they were exceptional or dazzling. In fact, one of our conclusions from this study is that effective teaching—even best teaching—is rarely dazzling. Moreover, “dazzling” may be something of an impediment to effective teaching, in that it calls attention to the manner and methods of the teacher rather than to the engagement in subject matter and ultimate mastery on the part of the students. So what follows here is a series of ordinary lessons, notable only for the fact that the teachers who conducted them found them to be especially effective with boys.

We believe teachers everywhere will recognize elements of their own practice—including quite ordinary ones—in the “best lessons” that follow. What makes these lessons effective and best for the teachers and boys reporting them is not that they are anomalous or, in most cases, surprising, but simply that they engaged boys’ attention and energy. In short, they worked.

LESSON 1: “TWICE THE SPEED”: A LESSON ON THE PRINCIPLES OF MOMENTUM

Many of the effective lessons reported in this study required building something, that is, creating a product. A variety of these lessons are included in the next chapter. A New Zealand teacher of technology reported gratifying results in conducting the following lesson with his middle school boys:

This unit of work was based on the F1 in Schools CO₂ dragster project, an international competition for school children (aged eleven to eighteen), in which groups of three to six children (in this case, individual students) have to design and manufacture a miniature car out of balsa wood. The cars are powered by carbon dioxide cartridges and are attached to a track by a thin wire. They are timed by a computer from the moment they are launched to when they pass the finish line. The cars have to follow specific guidelines (for example, the wheels of the car must be in contact with the track at all times). The cars are raced on a 20 meter long track (in the international competition, it is roughly 25 meters) with two lanes, to allow two cars to be raced simultaneously.

The lesson started with an introduction in the classroom to the project and an explanation of the processes involved. This included showing the students the balsa wood billets, carbon dioxide canister, and wheels they were going to use and an example of a completed dragster. They were then asked what main features or key factors they needed to research in order to start designing and manufacturing their own car. These included aerodynamics, friction, momentum and inertia, surface finish, and some others, and they were written on the board and copied by the boys. Then the boys were asked how fast the car would travel down the track, and a general consensus was met of about 30 to 40 kilometers per hour, again written on the board.

Next, they went into the workshop and formed two lines down each side of the track. Waiting until they had settled down and were paying attention, I explained the mechanics of the start gate, finish gate, and timing system. We use a simple set of microswitches to start and stop two timers with red LED electronic displays. I then converted a predicted speed of 36 kilometers per hour to a time of 2 seconds. Then the example dragster was placed on the track and attached to the wire. The carbon dioxide canister was placed in the back of the car, which was loaded into the start gate.

Then the students were instructed to start a countdown from 3. At the end of the countdown, the spring-loaded firing pin was released with a loud snap and a puff of carbon dioxide. In a second, the car had disappeared down the track and into the finish gate.

When the boys calmed down, the time was checked and converted into kilometers per hour. At less than 1 second, the speed was an average of about 70 kilometers per hour and the maximum was obviously higher, taking into account friction and wind resistance versus momentum.

When the boys returned to the classroom, they analyzed the dragster’s performance with regard to identifying the most important factor to achieving a good race time and what they needed to research.

This introduction led into a series of theory-based research lessons that had a practical example to put them into context. The initial demonstration provided motivation to the students to produce self-motivated work and was referred to as much as possible.

In this lesson, the instructor challenges his students to design a model vehicle that will compete with other models to see which can go fastest. The learning objectives are student mastery of a number of physics principles—momentum, aerodynamics, friction—and an understanding of the competition’s specifications and the applied construction skills necessary to make and modify the vehicle.

The boys are challenged to predict the speed of their vehicles given their understanding of the principles set out in the exercise. Because teams of boys will construct the dragsters, they will exercise interpersonal skills as well.

A number of factors are transitive to achieving these learning outcomes:

• The stimulus of competition

• The stimulation of interactive exchanges with team members

• Opportunities for physical movement and manipulation of materials

• The drama of the demonstration—perhaps the most transitive component of the lesson. The kind of dragster that the teacher demonstrated not only sped down the miniature raceway; it did so at twice the speed the boys had predicted. The teacher heightened the drama of the demonstration by a simulated countdown to the launch of the car. The demonstration model raced down to the finish line at 70 kilometers per hour—twice the predicted speed. The boys were stirred to the extent they had to be “calmed down” before proceeding to subsequent analysis and tasks.

The demonstration was thus clearly transitive to a variety of learning outcomes. In the narrating teacher’s words, the demonstration was “referred to as much as possible” as the boys undertook their subsequent tasks, which, the teacher reported, had become “self-motivated.”

LESSON 2: RISING TO POWER, RULING THE WORLD: “GAMING” THE TEACHING OF LATIN AND CLASSICAL CULTURE

The teachers participating in this study reported a variety of successes in converting all kinds of scholastic work—from mastering rudiments of foreign language to reviewing extensive sweeps of material before exams—to a game. (The various ways teachers employed games to enrich classroom business considered in Chapter Three.) In this instance, an experienced U.S. teacher of Latin recounts how he and his colleagues converted the school’s eighth-grade Latin curriculum to an extended game:

Our eighth-grade Latin curriculum has been transformed over the past three years. We have attempted to help our eighth graders improve their transition into our high school Latin program. We created a new textbook that emphasized a grammatical approach while also including longer stories to translate, an introduction to questions similar to the ones the boys would see on the national Latin exam, work with derivatives to improve the students’ English vocabulary, and a threefold increase in the number of vocabulary words. We have incorporated daily use of a Smart Board to emphasize the work introduced in our text and enable the students to interact with manipulative exercises. We incorporate work at the board, in partners, in every class. We use PowerPoint productions to show the relationship between what we are reading and studying as it appears in later art and literature.

Each activity has an element of competition to it on a number of levels. First, students strive to move up the Cursus Honorum [to honors course level] throughout the year. This is based on the student’s average. His picture begins at the rank of “citizen,” and he strives to improve his status until he reaches the position of “consul,” or leader of his team. Lone perfect scores within a team enable that student to claim dictatorial power until his quiz scores are no longer the highest.

The teams are designated by color, similar to the teams that raced in the Circus Maximus. A class is divided into two teams of eight students each. There are six classes and thus twelve teams. These teams compete in a game called Bellum. Each quarter, the twelve teams (rotating each quarter) compete in a game of world domination loosely based on the game of Risk. With each new quarter comes a new map that represents roughly the time period being studied in their ancient history class.

Each day the teams strive to earn a maximum of fo...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• ABOUT THIS BOOK
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• THE AUTHORS
• Introduction
• PART One - Effective Lessons
• PART Two - Effective Relationships
• PART Three - Lessons for Educators
• APPENDIX - DESIGN AND RESEARCH METHODS FOR THE TEACHING BOYS STUDY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX