Male, Female or just an effective teacher?

Like some other teachers last night I watched the Sunday programme and the discussion about ‘Boys only classes’. To be honest none of it convinced me at all. What frustrated me straight away is that the class had a male teacher. Why did the school feel that a male teacher compared to a female teacher would be more affective? Are we then saying that all female schools should only have female teachers as they will perform better?

While the environment in which children are nurtured clearly affects the way they turn out, research into gender shows that there are significant physiological and behavioural difference between boys and girls from birth. (Anne Moir & David Jessel: Brainsex). Brains play a lot in this but it is the makeup of it. They have the same functions like vocabulary, mechanics of language, Visio-spatial perception and emotion (bearing on performance at school) but research has shown that the male brain is more specialised, with each of these four crucial functions being located in just one hemisphere, whilst in female’s three of the functions take place in both hemispheres (Anne Moir & David Jessel: Brainsex).

At five a boy is typically less able to sit, to concentrate, to listen or to communicate than a girl and has a greater need for variety, stimulation and physical activity. Therefore, the early years of schooling girls do perform better than boys.  And I am in no doubt that schools acknowledge this and play to both sets of strengths so that all pupils are able to achieve well. The problem is by the end of year 1 some boys have already switched off education. Girls typically do this by the end of year 4. (This is UK research I am not sure if it would be the same in NZ).

Even before my own son I have always been interested in Boys Education. I taught in East London and usually was given the more ‘disruptive’ boys in my class and (when we used to set) taught most of them for Literacy and Maths. If result were anything to go by, I as a female teacher did extremely well educating these boys. But it wasn’t just their results, they also socialised better and were in less trouble then they have ever been before. I not talking about silly antics on the playground I am talking about full on fights, chairs flying, knife welding 10-11 year olds that on many occasions I had to restrain.  As my head teacher said, they left our school as a completely different child to the ones that entered.

Typically girls will be keen to learn; boys need a little bit more convincing.  I spent years planning the majority of my lessons especially writing around the boys in my class and what they enjoyed. Due to the makeup of one year group, I changed a whole scheme of work and re wrote the entire Year 5 units for every subject so that it focussed more around the boy’s interests.

I’m not doing this to ‘brag’ but to highlight a point Does the gender of a teacher really matter? These research findings revealed that the gender of teachers had little apparent effect on the academic motivation and engagement of either boys or girls. For the majority of the children, the gender of the teacher was largely immaterial. They valued teachers, whether men or women, who were consistent and even-handed and supportive of them as learners.

As I only have 28 minutes I am stopping. In the end as many mentioned on Twitter what it comes down to an effective teacher regardless if it is male or female.

Steve Biddulph, Bill Rogers, Lucinda Neall, Ian Grant, Celia Lashlie are all great authors who have written about boys education. Well worth a read.