The Surprising Difference That Gender-Neutral Classrooms Can Make by Sarah Sparks in Education Week, May 9, 2012 (via Marshall Memo 436)
In
this intriguing Education Week
article, Sarah Sparks reports that while boys and girls naturally play together
as toddlers, by the time they reach kindergarten they are spending only 9
percent of their play time with children of the opposite sex. Girls might have
a “no boys allowed” lunch table and boys might exclude a quiet girl from their games.
“Separation is a fact of human childhood,” says Lise Eliot, a neuroscience
professor at Chicago Medical School and author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome
Gaps and What We Can Do About It (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009). The
tendency of young children to sex-segregate creates “two separate cultures that
persist throughout childhood.”
But
that doesn’t happen in all classrooms, reports Sparks. While children naturally
develop gender identity, she says, “classroom demographics and teacher
practices can make a big difference in how and whether students develop
sex-based stereotypes and prejudices.” Janet Hyde of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison has found that although there are small gender differences in
preschool children’s activity level (boys tend to be more active) and ability
to focus (girls tend to be better at this), there is “no solid evidence that
boys and girls actually learn differently.” Hyde is emphatic: “You never hear a
good, modern neuroscientist stay the brain is hard-wired. In fact, it is
characterized by great neural plasticity, so… any differences you see are at
least as likely caused by differences in the experiences of males and females
as to any kind of anatomical differences present from birth.”
•
Classroom demographics – Erin Pahlke
of Arizona State University/Tempe studied 21,000 early-childhood, kindergarten,
and first-grade children and found that gender parity in classrooms improves
behavior and achievement:
-
In
classes with approximately similar numbers of boys and girls, there is better
self-control among all children.
-
Children
in classes in which one or the other sex is the dominant majority (around 80
percent) are less self-controlled – and this is true for girls as well as boys.
-
When
there is a higher percentage of girls in a class, reading and math achievement improves
for boys and girls.
•
Teacher actions – Teachers’ beliefs
about student abilities play an important part, says Pahlke – for example,
thinking that boys are better than girls at math. In a class with more boys
than girls, a teacher might unconsciously think, “Oh, boys are better at math.
I can use more-advanced math approaches.” And the same might be true with
giving more-demanding reading assignments in a majority-female classroom.
Also, common classroom practices
like addressing students “Boys and girls” and lining them up separately causes
children to develop the idea that genders are fundamentally different, say
Pahlke and Rebecca Bigler of the University of Texas/Austin. “If you compare it
to race,” says Bigler, “if you said to your 1st grade classrooms,
‘Good morning, whites and Latinos; let’s have the Latinos get our pencils,’
what would happen is you would go to federal prison. Labeling children
routinely by race in your classroom is a violation of federal law, but, of
course, you can do this routinely with gender.”
Bigler
says that very young children can tell male from female, but they can also see
lots of other human differences – for example, ethnicity and whether people are
wearing hats. Kids tune in on how adults talk about differences: “Labeling is
especially powerful,” she says – for example, saying that a man is a “hat
wearer” makes the description more permanent and intrinsic in children’s minds
than saying, “he likes to wear hats.”
Researchers
had a group of summer-school teachers randomly distribute red and blue shirts
to their students and require that they be worn every day. In some classrooms,
teachers didn’t refer to the shirts at all, while in others, teachers used them
to group students – for example, lining up by red shirts and blue shirts or “Let’s
have the red students turn in their books now.” Bigler reports that in the
classrooms where teachers routinely referred to students by shirt color, even
though teachers weren’t saying that one color was better than the other, there
was stereotyping and prejudice among children. In classrooms where shirt color
wasn’t mentioned, that didn’t happen.
This
and other experiments lead researchers to conclude that the casual, unconscious
use of gender to address and organize students in primary-grade classrooms has
a major impact on children’s behavior. They enter preschool playing pretty
equally with either gender, but they rapidly move toward self-segregation,
playing overwhelmingly with their own gender and becoming less comfortable with
children of the opposite sex.
Laura Hanish of Arizona State
has found this leads children to behave in more gender-stereotyped ways, with
boys playing farther away from teachers and becoming more aggressive with each
other and girls playing closer to teachers and interacting in more “female”
ways. “As girls play with girls,” says Hanish, “they start to become more
skilled in the interactional styles and patterns typical of girls and less
skilled in the interactional styles and patterns associated with boys. You
start to see increasing segregation. Children develop a fairly limited set of
interaction skills: less understanding, appreciation, respect of one another.
All of that can translate into a host of problems across classrooms. It can
translate to less effective interactions across academic tasks, harassment,
bullying.”
The
Arizona State researchers created the Sanford Harmony Program to try to change
these dynamics and implemented it in several schools, focusing on two critical
transition grades – preschool and fifth grade. Teachers got professional
development on the impact of gender labeling on children. “It was an
eye-opening thing realizing how many times I was inadvertently categorizing the
children… based on whether they were boys or girls,” says preschool teacher
Jacque Radke. “There was personal self-awareness that came out.”
Throughout
the year, Radke and her colleague Erica Flynn did not use gender to address or
organize their students. Each Monday, children were paired with a new “class
buddy” of the opposite sex, and every day, buddies did an activity together –
art, music, active physical games, etc. The classes also had direct instruction
in social skills such as listening, sharing, and cooperation. Researchers found
that children in the gender-neutral classrooms were more socially competent,
less aggressive, less exclusionary, and showed better social skills toward both
boys and girls. Teachers reported that students were better behaved and better
at following directions than those in traditional classrooms.
“Every Monday, they’re excited
to come in and see who their new buddy is,” says Radke. “What we began to see
was on their own, they would sit with their buddy for the sit-down, read-aloud
activity… Not every buddy partnership works well, but I resisted the temptation
to change it, because there were a lot of odd couples that ended up working
well.”
Cliquishness also declined, said Flynn, and
students became more likely to play together, cooperate, and help each other.
“Before, there was a lot more arguing,” she says. “Now, we’ll hear them say
‘Good job’ or ‘It’s OK’ – really supportive words. It’s like they’re kinder to
each other.”
In
addition, some small-scale bullying that occurred at the beginning of the year
– telling a child he was not a friend or she couldn’t sit with a group –
completely vanished. “I truly believe that as the children engage in structured
buddy activities, they are learning to know each other, and this connection is
reflected by growth in their patience and tolerance as they interact together
throughout the day,” says Radke. “Not hearing that [bullying] language is a
huge change in our class.”
