Teaching primary-age boys with empathy: the myth of the “rowdy boy.”

We have all heard the claim that girls are simply easier to teach than boys, especially at the primary level. Boys won’t sit still, they don’t get along with each other, they’re unmanageable and “rowdy,” and they need to be corrected. Young boys are often treated like a problem in the classroom, whereas girls’ behaviours are seen as the norm. At the same time, we tend to believe that these behaviours are inherent: “boys will be boys.” We expect them to be a handful at best, and a nuisance at worst.

Going to school can already be a scary experience for young children. Now imagine being taught that your behaviour is simultaneously unacceptable and unavoidable. How are you supposed to thrive?

What if we stopped seeing boys’ behaviours as something to be corrected, and instead adapted our classrooms to suit their learning needs? Just like girls, boys need to feel loved and safe in school so that they’re best able to learn. We need to ask why most girls seem to be thriving in primary classrooms, and what we can do to make boys’ experiences in school more positive and nurturing.

“We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Ted Talk: We Should All Be Feminists).

School should not be a cage where students are taught to listen without talking, sit without moving, and learn without exploring. Rethinking the way we set up our classrooms will do a great service to boys, and it will also help girls as well. We might see that when given the freedom to, all types of students will thrive in a more flexible environment.

Here are 5 techniques for re-imagining your primary classroom so that both boys and girls are better able to learn.

1. Rethink your seating. One example is allowing your students to sit on an alternative chair, such as a yoga ball. The yoga ball allows them to move just a little bit, in a way that’s safer and less distracting than if they’re rocking on a stationary chair. The ball keeps their entire body engaged because they’re trying to stay balanced, so they’re better able to focus on the lesson.You can also raise some of the desks so that the students can stand and work.
2. Allow them to make choices. Create scheduled time during the day when students can make a choice, such as sitting wherever they want in the classroom. Tell them they can choose whether they want to sit at their desk, on the floor, on the carpet, etc. When they have choices they feel more invested in their learning, and more in control. They also have more incentive to listen because they don’t want to lose the privilege of having a choice.
3. Introduce imaginative boundaries. Some students are easily distracted when they’re asked to sit in a group, for example during guided reading on the carpet. Buying a cushion or a seat-cover that they have to stay seated on can help create those invisible boundaries. For students who need more space around their desk, you can tape a section on the floor and call it their “office.” If you need them to stay at their desks, you can ask them to “stay in their office,” instead of telling them to sit down. That way they still have space to move around and stand up if they want to.
4. Incorporate movement into your lessons. Introduce games and activities that require students to get up, run, jump, or freeze. You can ask students to run up to the board and hit the right answer with a fly-swatter, or try building words with playdough. Many boys are more kinesthetic learners, so these activities are not only fun, they also help students to remember more. There are so many strategies for kinesthetic learners to read about and incorporate into your class.
5. Reward good behaviour. Create behaviour charts for your students; each day they get a green, yellow or red rating for their behaviour. You can set targets for the number of green days they have, and if they hit their target then they can come to a fun end-of-week activity or event.

All students need to feel safe and loved in their classrooms. As teachers we need to examine our own gender-based biases. Do we unconsciously uphold patriarchy by allowing our girls to have emotional days while assuming that boys don’t have the same feelings? Are we telling boys not to cry or express anger or frustration? Do we first assume that boys are causing trouble instead of simply expressing their feelings? Approaching our boys with the same level of empathy that we extend to girls will model emotional intelligence and make our classrooms more nurturing, happy places.

Gender bias in books

Gender biases against boys aren’t only perpetuated by teachers, they can also be enforced by the literature we read to our students. Have you noticed that many famous picture books portray boys as “wild,” whereas girls are depicted as good and domestic?

“His mother called him ‘Wild Thing’ and Max said ‘I’ll eat you up!’ so he was sent to bed without eating anything.”

Peter Rabbit sneaks into Mr McGregor’s garden while his sisters, who are “good little bunnies,” stay home picking berries. Alexander has a “terrible horrible no good very bad day” and acts out against everyone around him.

Boys learn from their teachers and from their first encounters with literature that they are expected to misbehave and that an inherent part of their boyhood is developing an individualistic, rebellious personality. But by making outcasts of our boys we are causing a widening gap between them and their female counterparts in school. There are so many resources out there for improving relationships with boys in the classroom, and boys deserve to be liberated from the small hard cage of patriarchal expectations as much as girls do.

If you want to read more about ways that different educational leaders have re-thought their school structures, check out this blog about alternative education. Have you developed strategies for making your classroom more boy-friendly? We’d love to hear from you! Write us a comment or email us at zoe@teacherly.io