Helping Boys Learn
(http://www.education-world.com/a_issues/chat/chat170.shtml) |
"I
think the deep reason that these guys are not succeeding is that we are
starting to lose them so early."
Over
the past several decades, boys' behavior and performance in school has
continued to decline. Researchers like Michael Gurian say these are indications
that schools are not structured to accommodate how boys' brains work and how
they learn.
Included: Strategies for making classes more "boy friendly."
A
few decades ago, the assertion that schools need to do more to help boys
succeed would have raised a room full of eyebrows.
But
today, clearly boys are struggling in school. The majority of special education
students in the U.S. are boys. Most of the discipline problems in schools are
attributed to boys, and according to some figures, boys comprise 80 percent of
all high school dropouts. Less than 50 percent of the college population is
male.
A
large part of the problem, according to Michael Gurian, therapist, researcher,
author, and founder of
The Gurian Institute, is that schools are run counter to how
boys learn and how their brains operate. The language centers of girls' brains
develop earlier, so reading and writing comes easier to them, while boys'
brains are better at spatial-mechanical tasks and males learn better when they
are active.
The
Gurian Institute researches learning differences between the genders and
provides training for educators about how the brain learns and the differences
between how boys and girls learn.
In
the book,
The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from
Falling Behind in School and Life, Gurian and
co-author Kathy Stevens examine why boys are having more problems in school
than girls, and offer classroom strategies and activities for motivating boys,
without affecting the education of girls. Gurian talked with Education World
about why boys are falling behind and what schools and communities can do to
put them on the path to success.
Education
World:
In what ways do boys learn differently from girls?
Michael
Gurian:
The whole brain system is different. Boys tend to be more kinesthetic, more
hands-on, more spatial-mechanical. They don't tend to sit still to learn as
well as girls do. Of course, this is an average; there are some who can. They
don't tend to use as many words, they don't produce as many, and they don't
think in words as much. Boys have about half the verbal centers girls have, so
they don't rely as much on the words. They don't utilize their fine motor
skills as much, and they don't develop in the brain as quickly or as much and
that goes well into adulthood, too. They rely more on gross motor skills, so
that means more physical movement.
Then
there is another profound thing that readers seem to find very interesting,
which is the rest state. A boy's brain goes into a rest state many times during
the day, so he tends to be the one who "check out." He's almost half asleep.
Even in a rest state, girls have about half-active brains, so they are taking
notes more, and they don't zone out or check out as much. That in itself is
actually quite profound, because the classroom exacerbates that rest state. So
we lose more and more of these guys.
And
when teachers understand that, when they get that rest state, when we show them
the brain scans and they say, "Wow, look at that, that brain is completely shut
off," then they also see what's going on in relation to that more kinesthetic,
spatial-mechanical brain, and how much more it needs to move around, that it
can't just sit and listen to words.
EW:
The basic classroom learning environment/structure has been the same for
decades, serving both boys and girls. I'm sure we've all heard the stories
about 60 kids and a nun or one teacher in a room and no problems. Why has it
only been in the past few years that many schools have been found not to be
"boy friendly"?
Gurian:
It has not worked for many boys for many decades (girls began to outpace boys
in the 1970s in college attendance and high school graduation) --it's just that
the media and politics have caught up now.
Yeah,
that [system] did not work for a lot of boys. It's still an example of this
industrial [educational] system. If you interview those boys, and I get mail
from them, who are now men my age, or the next generation, in their 60s and
70s, their stories are so poignant. They say, "Boy, you hit the nail on the
head. I went to school in Hoboken, New Jersey? And I was bored out of my wits.
I hated it, I was truant, and the cops were coming for me"? See, this has been
developing for a couple of hundred years, I would say.
I
would say, though, if you are looking at traditional education or classical
education, one thing it did better than we do now is that it included children
constantly in relevance. Whatever they were learning was linked to some
relevance for them, whether they had a debate, or if they were reading a book.
[What was being taught] was important to your life. If you're reading Plato,
you'd better think about Plato.
The
thing that we've done over the past several decades because we are so
wonderfully experimental is that we've just thrown all this stuff in there, a
lot of which is not relevant. So that's a difference.
Another
thing that's different is that the authority system that was set up 50 or 100
years ago to support this industrial education of kids did a lot of good for
teachers in schools. Because if a kid talked back to a nun, or did not perform,
or at least didn't fake performing in the way we wanted him to, the mom or the
dad would punish him, or the head of school would punish him. Well, that
authority system is kind of gone, and that's a big difference. Industrial
schooling can work better for more people when you have a very authoritarian
system behind it. When we look back to the nuns [and teachers] we want to
remember that they were working with an "advantage" that doesn't exist now that
could get us through a few decades of this schooling system.
But
our public school system right now is not authoritarian; obviously, people are
worried about doing anything because they'll get sued.
But
it's gone so far the other way that it's a second major element that has
changed. Now any child who is not performing very well can get away with it for
years, because the authority system is not set up. The parents are often not
set up to punish the child, and the school system can't really do much to
punish the child.
EW:
What about boys from some other cultures, who don't seem to have as many
behavior and attention problems in school?
Gurian:
Certain elements are cultural. The brain differences are not. The brain
differences are chromosomal, so they are genetic; our research is from
everywhere. If you scan guys in Japan, or do brain scans of guys in Japan or
India, where I used to live, you see the same brain differences. Those brains
still go to a rest state. In those countries, and Japan is a very good example,
the test scores don't actually track boys who are being lost in the system,
because those boys leave the system. They have the Y track, so at a certain
point, say 10 or 12 years old, there's a fork in the road; the boys and girls
who are succeeding are going to go to the right, let's say, and move on to
higher secondary education and then college. The boys who go to the left side,
then, are not. They are going to move them as quickly as possible into
vocational education. So Japan is losing as many of these boys as we are. So is
India.
But
there's a reason people will say, "Well, look at those boys, they just sit
there and learn.”That’s some of the stereotyping. But they don't understand the
Japanese system. They don't notice that so many of these guys get culled out.
But when you do that, [and look at] the scores for all the kids when they are
15 years old, they found the same gaps we've got between their boys and their
girls.
Still,
there is a cultural difference in the way that people mentor and teach these
kids. Take Japan -- in Japan, they are going to school six days a week. For
those guys who go to school six days a week, school is life. And there are a
lot of mentorial relationships and tutorial relationships. All those guys are
getting tutoring, so they are integrating the master-apprentice relationship
into that school system. Also, the parents, generally the mom in that culture,
are completely devoted to supervising the education of those boys. And cultural
expectations of those boys?s
that school is life and that college is how they are going to get the job, and
this they must do. Now that's a cultural difference. We in the U.S. are
confused or unsure of how much to educate our kids, and a lot of our parents
don't breathe down their kids' necks and say, "You must do your homework now,
and that's it."
The
culture differences?re
in how we guide children to get educated. But the brain differences are robust
wherever you go.
EW:
How has the declining number of male teachers, especially at the elementary
level, affected the education of boys?
Gurian:
Boys need males to help them find footprints to follow into manhood. In
elementary years, male teachers sometimes understand boy energy better than
some female teachers. In middle and high school, puberty and adolescence makes
it even more important that boys find men to model from. Female teachers do and
can do a great job, but must be trained in how boys learn -- and how they learn
differently from girls.
EW:
What are some ways an elementary school teacher can motivate the male students
and make the classroom more "boy friendly"?
Gurian:
We've got ten years of action research and success data that shows that the
first thing you should do is get professional development training [for
teachers] in how the male brain actually learns. Now the reason that's the most
important is that the teachers already are really smart people. They don't need
an expert to tell them what to do. What they need the expert to do is to
provide them with the developmental training in the area in which they have the
empty spots, the blind spots. Because the schools of education don't at this
point provide it -- there are a lot of politics in schools of education and a
lot of gender politics. Actually, many of them haven't even caught up to the
fact that there is this problem. So they are just throwing the teachers out
there with all sorts of great training, but not any gender training.
[After
the training,] they'll come up with some innovations. They'll end up allowing
more physical movement, and the girls don't mind, and there's always one girl
who like to move around. too. Some girls don't fit the normal verbal girl
model. That will keep the brains out of rest state. That will compel these
brains to keep working, and that leads to better education.
There
are many ways to facilitate physical movement; a boy can just pace a little. I
got an e-mail recently from a teacher who had an old exercise machine she was
going to throw away, and she brought it into the class. She let this one guy
who was causing so many of the problems walk on the exercise machine while he
was listening to the lecture and that took care of most of the problems she was
having with this boy.
Another
thing is teachers will look at how they are teaching reading, writing, and
language arts. Once they see the scans, and see how much less of the boys'
brains is working in these verbal areas, and see how much more is working in
the spatials, they will utilize more graphics. A key way of doing this in the
third and fourth grades is during the brainstorming phase [before students
write] is to let the kids who want to and who think visually and graphically
draw with colored pencils. They will draw what they are going to write about.
And we have great data on this -- in the chapter on reading and language arts,
we have all sorts of success from folks who have done this. And the kids'
grades will go up, because they now will have sensory detail once they start
writing.
A
third thing that they can do is become more project-driven and less
strand-driven. Right now, one of the innovations we did to help girls is we
decided to make mathematics more strand-driven. So not only do kids write more
in math class to get more female verbal in, and get the parity there for girls,
but they also teach math in strands, so you have five, six, seven things going
on at once to get to a conclusion. Now that's a much more female way of
teaching math. The male way is much more task-focused, single focused, because
the male brains liberalizes activity. We do a task in one part of the brain
while females do the same task in a number of parts. So in order to help the
boys, we don't give up the strand thinking for the girls; but we make sure that
we do project-driven thinking, in which we do one thing, one strand, and the
kids who want to, will just focus on the project, and they don't have to
multi-task the strands.
And
the teachers know how to do both these, because most teaching in math initially
was project-driven, it was point A to point B calculations. Now they know how
to do the strands as well. So they can do both. As with everything, we're
saying, "Meet in the middle." We have to go back to some project thinking.
And
the last little thing is boys learn in master-apprentice relationships. They
have for almost a million years. We need to bring more of the retired men from
the community into our classrooms to read to our second graders and third
graders. And we need to bring more of these mentors and more of these people in
to help the teachers in the classroom, all the way through middle school, to
get this other voice, this second person, this second mother, or this second
grandfather in there, helping to be there for these kids. Boys don't learn as
well with 30 people to one teacher. Boys' brains are not as adaptable to that
framework. They are more adaptable to the one-on-one, single project
[approach], which I call the master-apprentice.
EW:
Boys seem to be drawn more to video and computer games than girls. How does
"screen time" affect boys' development, and how can teachers and parents lure
them away?
Gurian:
Neurally, it's the prolonged time in front of the screen that we have to worry
about. The reason we devoted most of one chapter in The Minds of Boys to
screen time is because now the science-based research is clear that this is
affecting brain development?[Some research has shown that young children who
watch a lot of television are at greater risk of developing Attention Deficit
Disorder (ADD).] Generally, we're finding there's an awakening among parents.
They understand that the male brain is very mesmerized by any screens and
spatials but they're also realizing that this must be done in moderation. A gun
is attractive to someone who is spatial, but we don't give him a gun.
I
think the role educators can play is in the parent-teacher conferences,
especially in pre-school and early childhood classes, when they can say, "Hey,
check out this research. You have to look to at this. Your son really could be
affected."
Then for those middle and high school teachers, if the child is having trouble in school, I think immediately, one of the big five the teacher would talk about with the parents is screen time. Obviously, nutrition is one, as is whether there are crises at home, those are very big. But based on the new research, I would put in screen time in the big five.. Because a lot of middle schoolers now are just too distracted to learn because they are even watching movies while driving down the road with their parents. I'm begging parents not to do that. I'd love the carmakers not to put theaters in cars. But that will never happen. But we're begging. EW:
What do you think is behind the high dropout rate and decreasing college
attendance rate for boys?
Gurian:
I think the deep reason that these guys are not succeeding is that we are
starting to lose them so early. This [male brain] is a chromosomally hard-wired
system that learns in a way that is at a mismatch with school. The way the
conventional schooling system is set up -- sit down, learn, read, write -- we
lose so many of these guys so early, because the guys' verbal centers come in a
year to a year and a half later.
By
the time they get to high school, a number of them are bored out of their wits;
they don't see any relevance to the way they think and where they are going in
life. They're reading books like Pride and Prejudice, stuff which I
liked because I'm a writer and so on, but for most of these guys, this is not
relevant to them. They are learning nothing from this.
So
they don't see the relevance, they have been bored and mislabeled and
misdiagnosed for about a decade now. I don't think we can hang onto these guys.
They look at college and they say "College? I'm going to get more of the same."
So what's too bad about it, as you know, is if they don't go to college there
are a lot of ramifications. And so that's why we would like to change the
school system from pre-school forward and get it to accommodate the male brain,
so by the time they are in high school, they like it.
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