Do Boys and Girls Learn Differently?

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.