Boys Don't Try? Rethinking Masculinity in Schools

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Sometimes, this might mean ‘spoon-feeding’ an answer to a boy in a 1:1 chat and then asking him to tell the class the answer in a whole class discussion later on so he can experience the pleasure of ‘being right.’ 4 | Focus on productivity Learning in a home and school environment where the benefit of academic work is encouraged and a work ethic is valued gives students the confidence that comes with the expectation to do better; to achieve.

This book is easy to read, but hard to listen to. I’m reassured by the solutions, but frustrated by all the mistakes we’ve been making for so long. Self-deprecating humour works well. In fact, humour generally has been found to have a positive effect on retention and recall.The fact is, these myths, like all myths, are totally fallacious. If teachers really want to improve outcomes for boys, then they need to build positive relationships with them. We recommend the following steps to getting boys on side: 1 | Avoid confrontation As Roberts and Pinkett make clear throughout Boys Don’t Try, high expectations are far more useful to build student self-esteem. Similar classes I’ve taught more recently have completed the same tasks as top sets, with often just as good results. Again supporting Roberts’ assertion that setting is rarely just about ability. Research by Reid et al found that Key Stage 2 pupils viewed being shouted at as ineffective and damaging to long-term relationships between teachers and pupils. Our book, Boys Don’t Try? Rethinking Masculinity in Schools was born out of a response to the snake-oil solutions to raising male achievement that proliferate much of the discourse around boys and their relative academic underachievement in comparison to girls. Secondly, Roberts invokes Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to argue that teaching boys content they find relevant does them a disservice by not giving them access to “certain knowledge, behaviours, and skills” that are “highly valued in society”. Teaching only highly relevant content also reinforces low expectations of what boys can and need to learn.

Chapter 4: Mental Health– Another thought-provoking listen with chilling statistics. Pleased to know that a number of the recommended strategies are already in place in my setting. Appreciated the mention of teacher modelling openly talking about their emotions and shoulder-shoulder talks, which made me think of a Pivotal podcast that I listened to in my first year of teaching and has stayed with me since..A “good student” is seen as a compliant one, with boys more frequently sanctioned and girls spending more time on homework. Chapter 1: The Engagement Myth– The first chapter is already really thought-provoking and I have added Why Don’t Students Like School by Daniel T Willingham to my “Want to read” list! I appreciate the crossover of research in this and other books / articles I’ve read – today, it was Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction. I’m reflecting on how these principles can be applied to online learning, something we have been working on as a staff. (During a recent In-Service training, we worked in our level groups to identify aspects of effective learning and teaching. Then we matched them to the 12 features of high-quality lessons identified by Bruce Robertson in The Teaching Delusion as well as Rosenshine’s Principles.) Be warned though: sarcasm as a form of humour is a huge no-no. ‘Banter’ with the boys is not appreciated. Even when boys seem to be enjoying it, they’re probably not. What about the boys?’ is a common refrain in education circles when discussing academic achievement, particularly in English. What we do know is that for some boys, public praise is not welcomed, because being praised publicly, in front of other boys, could damage their valuable masculine status.

We’ve seen a shift in the gender gap over the last few decades from where it was the male students who went to university, to the females more likely to do so. That gap is now in favour of girls, in a number of domains. It’s not huge,” she says.

Chapter 3: Peer Pressure– I enjoyed listening to this during an early morning walk in the snow. I need to look up Kate Myers’ research. As a reader, it’s a scary moment when it dawns that these strategies were doing more harm than good. The World Cup of Writing created more losers than winners. The sports text reinforced stereotypes of masculinity and prevented students from building cultural capital. In one colleague’s maths lesson, the boys remembered far more about pizza toppings than the formula for calculating the area of a circle. Research shows that boys are very competitive, care about the result of a competition more than girls, and they strive to be part of the “high ability” club. Roberts argues this hyper-competitive spirit breeds a self-destructive behaviour in boys that results in them “downing” the textbooks to protect their self-esteem: “If I haven’t tried, I haven’t really failed,” is the thinking behind this.