Author Mark Roberts was one such teacher, but, as he explains through anecdote and research findings, a raft of unintended consequences stem from creating a hyper competitive environment for boys and endeavouring to make all learning “relevant” to their lives. Myths abound: engage boys by introducing a competitive element to your lessons; engage boys by using technology; engage boys by choosing topics that are relevant to their own lives… the list goes on. Often boys will opt out of doing work because in the status-driven world of toxic masculinity it’s easier to not try and fail, than it is to try and risk failure. In Boys Don’t Try? Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts directly link boys’ relative educational underachievement to mistaken attempts to aspire to an “outdated, but nonetheless widespread idea” about what it means to be a “real man” and “a brand of masculinity that leaves many boys floundering” - and make no mistake, it is a brand, sold hard yet often unthinkingly, with very real casualties. The message is clear: we have a lot of work to do. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)

Boys Don’t Try? Rethinking Masculinity in Schools is available via https://www.routledge.com/9780815350255. Do you have an idea for a story? Chapter 5: Expectations– Unsurprisingly, I’ve now decided I need to buy a physical copy of this book. I also need to read up on Mary Myatt’s work highlighting changing the language from “ability” to “attainment”. I found the whole mixed ability over setting section really interesting. As highlighted earlier, I would love to find out about secondaries that are making this work as I use this mixed ability approach in my primary class. (If you know of any secondaries that use a mixed ability approach – please let me know!)Some boys, believing that they’ll never get recognition for any academic output, will try to seek attention by playing up in class. Self-deprecating humour works well. In fact, humour generally has been found to have a positive effect on retention and recall. 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. Despite the continued debunking of the learning styles theory, the notion that boys benefit from kinaesthetic activities persists. Willingham ( 2009) states: Positive climate: Try a variety of teaching methods with active involvement from students and move away from punitive discipline into a more positive school climate.

Pinkett’s Damascene moment came a few years into his teaching career while discussing a poem with a female colleague. She said the way he interpreted it was down to the fact that, as a man, he thought about sex the whole time. “It was acceptable sexism, because it was directed at a man not a woman,” says Pinkett. “And it made me realise that, though girls and women undoubtedly come off worse as a result of sexist assumptions, boys and men are damaged by them, too.” So is there really a crisis? Or some kind of moral panic? Why are boys falling behind? And what can we do to help them achieve more? Crisis As aresult of this attainment gap, schools up and down the country have invested time and money in training aimed at raising boys’ attainment. Indeed, Ihave sat through anumber of well-intentioned staff INSET sessions during my many years as ateacher, where Ihave been told that boys and girls learn differently, that boys thrive in acompetitive environment and that Ishould consider ways to make my subject more ​ ‘boy-friendly’. However, simply looking around my classroom at the wonderfully different characters Ihad in front of me suggested these solutions were not really solutions at all: boys are not all the same.

In the UK, as in other western countries, this problem is stark and has dire consequences. Boys are more likely to be expelled from school, less likely to go to university and not as likely as girls to find employment between the ages of 22 and 29. Most disturbingly, men are also three times more likely than women to commit suicide and comprise 96 per cent of the UK prison population. Schools are not the only drivers with regards to societal norms around gender but they certainly have the opportunity to dispel archaic workplace gender stereotypes.” Schools may not be able to change the world, but they can challenge, encourage, and widen horizons.” The Research Schools Network is anetwork of schools that support the use of evidence to improve teaching practice. 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.

In the book, he and Roberts push the idea of “tender masculinity”, which they counter not with “toxic masculinity”, a term they find unhelpful, but with “non-tender masculinity”, since that implies the absence of something better, rather than the presence of something poisonous. As an English teacher and a feminist, I like to think that I’m quite attuned to the ways in which language reveals certain social assumptions. I’ve spent hours patiently discussing the problems with language like “That’s so gay” and questioning the nature of ‘banter’ with frustrated students who didn’t see the problem. Yet, just in this blog, I’ve used phrases like “challenging boys” and described a low set without mentioning the gender divide, assuming the unequal gender divide of bottom sets to be implicit. As a new HOD, I have tried to ensure that we teach some non-stereotypical texts, but unlike Pinkett, I don’t currently make an effort to use homonormative pronouns in the classroom. I can imagine the way that my classes might respond to his example “Why might a man write his boyfriend a sonnet?” and have been somewhat unwilling to disrupt learning in this way. Although I regularly have the kind of “Why do we assume his love is a woman?” conversations about literature, I definitely haven’t yet normalised the ‘no song and dance’ approach that Pinkett advocates. Knowing your subject will make you a more confident teacher, which is a good thing; but be humble too. Teachers are confronted with proof of our own negative bias against boys - “a simple tally of comments revealed 54 positive comments about girls compared with 22 negative […] 32 positive comments about boys compared with 54 negative comments” - alongside our prejudice against children from low-income families: “It’s us we need to focus on”, because with hard-to-reach families “perseverance - not prejudice - gets results”. And those results might include, but not be restricted to, the narrow criteria of attending Russell Group universities. Stephanie Keenan is head of English at Ruislip High School. She blogs here and tweets @HeadofEnglishChapter 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.) We are forced to reflect on our own practice to see just how much we are doing that might be just as damaging.

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.

Each chapter hammers home another area of our failure. We’re forced to dwell on the failure, re-live the stories and problems, and then we are treated to a well-explained and carefully written summary of research in the area, before getting solutions. These are not ground-breaking – they are simple and straightforward – but each is something we are (mostly) not doing well at the moment. If we can encourage boys to really value formal education, help them see it for themselves, it goes a long way to helping them to meaningfully engage and embrace it.” In fact, an Australian study by Josephine Infantino and Emma Little found that of 350 pupils sampled, 78% felt that a private rebuke was the most effective method of dealing with inappropriate behaviour. Chapter 8: Violence– Some really thought-provoking questions asked as part of a suggested approach for dealing with violence in schools: Explanation – Reflection – Expression (E-R-E). This could be particularly helpful re playground incidents. I also appreciated the highlighted need for conversation and support for those who walk away from a confrontation as I hadn’t considered the impacts of this before.