This coming term, I am looking forward to teaching writing. During our planning day the Team analysed their data for writing and looked at what our needs were for writing in our cohort. There is a trend of content and ideas as well as language features being an area of concern. One of the teachers in the syndicate had found a link in tki about creating success for boys.
After sharing the link with the Team, we agreed this would be a way we could engage our boys and in turn improve the quality of the writing in our cohort. As I read through our planning I am feeling excited and engaged myself...hope I can instill these feeling of enthusiasm with my children.
There are some very important research I need to be mindful of as I teach these struggling writers which happen to be boys.
Except from Story Starters - Teacher Support Materials - HOW BOYS LEARN
RESEARCH
Learners, irrespective of their gender, ethnicity, age or any other characteristic only learn when they are motivated to learn and are engaged with what is to be learnt. The evidence is that boys are not achieving as well as girls in reading and writing. The issue then, is how best to engineer learning environments that they find motivating and engaging. There is much research available that provides guidance with this.
The Best Evidence Synthesis Diverse Students1 (2003) was designed to provide a collation of the evidence of what works within the context of diverse classes of students which is the reality for New Zealand teachers. Ensuring that boys learn and achieve as well as girls is one of the problems of diversity that teachers face.
This resource specifically draws on many of the aspects listed in the Best Evidence Synthesis:
• Teaching and tasks are structured to support students’ active learning orientations.
• Students help each other with resource access and provide elaborated explanations.
• Pedagogical practice is appropriately responsive to the interdependence of socio-cultural and cognitive dimensions.
• Relevance is made transparent to students.
• Ways of taking meaning from text, discourse, numbers or experience are made explicit.
• Teaching builds on students’ prior experiences and knowledge.
• Student diversity is utilised effectively as a pedagogical resource.
• Teaching is responsive to all learners • Students have opportunities to resolve cognitive conflict.
• Optimal use is made of complementary combinations of teacher-directed groupings, co-operative groups, structured peer interaction and individual work (including homework) to facilitate learning cycles.
• Tasks and classroom interactions provide scaffolds to facilitate student learning
• Students receive effective, specific, appropriately frequent, positive and responsive feedback.
• Teaching promotes metacognitive strategy use (e.g. mental strategies in numeracy) by all students.
• Teaching scaffolds reciprocal or alternating tuakana teina roles in student group, or interactive work. • Teaching promotes sustained thoughtfulness (e.g. through questioning approaches, wait-time, and the provision of opportunities for application and invention).
Additional research has provided practical strategies for teaching boys that we have used to critique and shape the resources.
An international study by Richard Hawley and Michael Reichert2 examined the narratives submitted by teachers and boys from 18 schools representing the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa of specific lessons and practices that they deemed especially effective.
“The successful lessons fell into the following eight general categories, each of which expresses a dominant feature of the lesson’s reported success:
• Lessons that produced products
• Lessons structured as games
• Lessons requiring vigorous motor activity
• Lessons requiring boys to assume a role or responsibility for promoting the learning of others
• Lessons that required boys to address “open,” unsolved problems
• Lessons that required a combination of teamwork and competition
• Lessons that focused on boys’ personal realization (their masculinity, their values, their present and future social roles)
• Lessons that introduced dramatic novelties and surprises
Nearly every reported lesson included multiple elements, as when a teacher devises a game in which boys form teams to create a product that will be judged competitively. It appeared increasingly clear to us as we reviewed the teacher responses that these lessons had a distinct for-boys cast, a finding roundly confirmed by the boys themselves.” Story Starters is a resource that is specifically designed to be used in ways that tick the majority of these features.
In summary, these resources are designed to engage and motivate boys because:
• Content has been designed by boys for boys
• The content is fun – in a boyish sort of way
• They involve videos that require the boys to address open, unsolved problems
• They involve team work
• They enable teachers to engage with humour with the boys sense of fun and drama So with
• They enable boys to connect with the teacher as relational learners (Wayne Martino, 20083 )
Story Starters is not a panacea for boys’ underachievement but, in the hands of a teacher who is keen to adjust his or her teaching to be responsive and to motivate and engage boys, it will prove a useful and fun resource.
So with this in mind, roll on Monday!!!
After sharing the link with the Team, we agreed this would be a way we could engage our boys and in turn improve the quality of the writing in our cohort. As I read through our planning I am feeling excited and engaged myself...hope I can instill these feeling of enthusiasm with my children.
There are some very important research I need to be mindful of as I teach these struggling writers which happen to be boys.
Except from Story Starters - Teacher Support Materials - HOW BOYS LEARN
RESEARCH
Learners, irrespective of their gender, ethnicity, age or any other characteristic only learn when they are motivated to learn and are engaged with what is to be learnt. The evidence is that boys are not achieving as well as girls in reading and writing. The issue then, is how best to engineer learning environments that they find motivating and engaging. There is much research available that provides guidance with this.
The Best Evidence Synthesis Diverse Students1 (2003) was designed to provide a collation of the evidence of what works within the context of diverse classes of students which is the reality for New Zealand teachers. Ensuring that boys learn and achieve as well as girls is one of the problems of diversity that teachers face.
This resource specifically draws on many of the aspects listed in the Best Evidence Synthesis:
• Teaching and tasks are structured to support students’ active learning orientations.
• Students help each other with resource access and provide elaborated explanations.
• Pedagogical practice is appropriately responsive to the interdependence of socio-cultural and cognitive dimensions.
• Relevance is made transparent to students.
• Ways of taking meaning from text, discourse, numbers or experience are made explicit.
• Teaching builds on students’ prior experiences and knowledge.
• Student diversity is utilised effectively as a pedagogical resource.
• Teaching is responsive to all learners • Students have opportunities to resolve cognitive conflict.
• Optimal use is made of complementary combinations of teacher-directed groupings, co-operative groups, structured peer interaction and individual work (including homework) to facilitate learning cycles.
• Tasks and classroom interactions provide scaffolds to facilitate student learning
• Students receive effective, specific, appropriately frequent, positive and responsive feedback.
• Teaching promotes metacognitive strategy use (e.g. mental strategies in numeracy) by all students.
• Teaching scaffolds reciprocal or alternating tuakana teina roles in student group, or interactive work. • Teaching promotes sustained thoughtfulness (e.g. through questioning approaches, wait-time, and the provision of opportunities for application and invention).
Additional research has provided practical strategies for teaching boys that we have used to critique and shape the resources.
An international study by Richard Hawley and Michael Reichert2 examined the narratives submitted by teachers and boys from 18 schools representing the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa of specific lessons and practices that they deemed especially effective.
“The successful lessons fell into the following eight general categories, each of which expresses a dominant feature of the lesson’s reported success:
• Lessons that produced products
• Lessons structured as games
• Lessons requiring vigorous motor activity
• Lessons requiring boys to assume a role or responsibility for promoting the learning of others
• Lessons that required boys to address “open,” unsolved problems
• Lessons that required a combination of teamwork and competition
• Lessons that focused on boys’ personal realization (their masculinity, their values, their present and future social roles)
• Lessons that introduced dramatic novelties and surprises
Nearly every reported lesson included multiple elements, as when a teacher devises a game in which boys form teams to create a product that will be judged competitively. It appeared increasingly clear to us as we reviewed the teacher responses that these lessons had a distinct for-boys cast, a finding roundly confirmed by the boys themselves.” Story Starters is a resource that is specifically designed to be used in ways that tick the majority of these features.
In summary, these resources are designed to engage and motivate boys because:
• Content has been designed by boys for boys
• The content is fun – in a boyish sort of way
• They involve videos that require the boys to address open, unsolved problems
• They involve team work
• They enable teachers to engage with humour with the boys sense of fun and drama So with
• They enable boys to connect with the teacher as relational learners (Wayne Martino, 20083 )
Story Starters is not a panacea for boys’ underachievement but, in the hands of a teacher who is keen to adjust his or her teaching to be responsive and to motivate and engage boys, it will prove a useful and fun resource.
So with this in mind, roll on Monday!!!
