The other day, a woman told me about a conversation she had with other moms from her son’s school. The topic fell to the differences between girls and boys and one mother emphatically stressed that little boys definitely need recess and perhaps can’t sit as long as little girls can.
So, she asked the question: “Do boys and girls learn differently? And if so—how should teachers train for this without falling into the slippery slope of gender-generalizations that we discussed before?”
My answer is that yes, boys and girls do learn differently. For those interested in what those differences are, there is plenty of research including some exciting information coming out of brain research these days. (A book I recommend is Raising Cain by Michael Thompson.) What all this conversation dances around is that education is all too often not so good either for boys or girls. Good education takes into consideration the needs of each child, treats them as individuals, and doesn’t label.
The differences between boys and girls are real but they are averages. They are broad generalizations and there are very few generalizations that are true for all boys and all girls. Most people know that girls have an easier time sitting still and working with small motor activity at their desks. Boys tend to want to be moving and tend to gravitate to physical, competitive play. We could go on, right?
But the critical piece that is rarely talked about is that the differences among boys and the differences among girls are so wide in almost every category that the “differences between boys and girls” tends to be not so important and even a distraction.
Every class of fifteen or thirty kids has so many different kinds of learners in it that which ones are the boys and which are the girls does not matter. If the teacher is charged with making sure the needs of all the kids are met, then he or she will provide a wide range of different kinds of learning experiences. Kids who have trouble sitting still will have times when they learn to sit still mixed with times when they can move their bodies more. Kids, of either sex, who have trouble attending should not be labeled, but worked with individually to help each one discover how they can strengthen their attention muscles.
In that last sentence I deliberately sounded unscientific. My reason? The science of teaching is increasingly being driven by scientific discoveries in other fields, when it should merely be informed by them. The science of education is the science of leading each child’s genius out in the world to function effectively in it. At its core is the concept that each child is unique and that good teaching teaches as if each child is unique.
So in the early years, there need to be centers around the room that are so carefully designed that children want to work in them and in this process, direct themselves into the complexities of language and mathematics, as well as art, physics, and biology. Group activities need to have many ways of different students to “strut their stuff,” and not always make some kids look like the good ones and the rest feel less.
The great teachers I have known have always maintained that “children teach themselves to read.” These are the words of my current first grade teacher—when she taught kindergarten, her students would almost always go on to first grade reading. She was very sophisticated in her teaching so that students taught themselves to read. All good teachers do that—they create the conditions in which children will, on their own time table and in their own way, learn all that needs to be learned. That is what we need, and it is gender-neutral.
The differences between girls and boys is widely known. Let’s not forget that it is so true that it has been cliché for at least a hundred years that schooling is not for boys—schooling done traditionally, that is. It was Mark Twain who said: “I never let schooling interfere with my education.
Related Story: What’s up with Boys?
From the Principal’s Office: Lessons on Learning, Life, and Parenting is published bi-monthly. Each column is written by Rick Ackerly, a distinguished educator with thirty years experience in middle and elementary school education, who is currently the Head of the Children’s Day School in San Francisco.
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