Recently, I asked teachers to submit questions about their relationships with male students. This one beautifully expressed a complaint common among many who work with boys:
What can a teacher do, when, despite considerable effort to connect with a boy, show genuine care, and indicate avenues for improvement, he or she is met with an appreciative smile, compliant gestures, promises to improve, and then nothing happens! I have often felt frustrated and to some degree powerless. It is mightily tempting to attribute lack of progress for the "lazy boy" to immutable characteristics. I hear his parents express their frustration about lack of motivation and drive. I listen, nodding, to similarly themed anecdotes from colleagues about the same boy, offered, at times, in a spirit of "surrender to the inevitable." And yet, as an educator, in moments of honest self-reflection, I am conflicted by an innate sense that somewhere in my relationship with the boy is the key to unlocking his potential. After all, that is why I chose this profession. Is it right to acknowledge in myself, even tacitly, that "There is only so much I can do?" That, for some boys, underachievement is unavoidable? If I believe in the research evidence—and I think I do—that suggests there is a teacher, somewhere, reaching similar boys every day, then what can I do to reach my "lazy boy" tomorrow?
The Gender Achievement Gap
From 2010–2012, my research partner Richard Hawley and I collected narratives from more than 1,000 teachers in 36 schools in an international study of relational teaching approaches with boys. I heard many versions of the above question and other types of concerns that arise in classrooms and on athletic fields: about defiant and disruptive boys, boys who rally their classmates against the teacher's purpose, boys who are broken somehow—painfully reticent and shy, or stuck in passivity and depression. More poignantly than any gross statistic, stories of teachers' struggles with male students bring home the human dimension of the troubling gender achievement gap.
There are historic challenges facing boys today, challenges that focus on education but call into question the very design of boyhood itself. Boys may have been the original beneficiaries of schools—which were invented in Renaissance times to perpetuate social arrangements from one generation to the next—but it would be a stretch to claim that schools have been designed with boys' needs in mind. Instead, to socialize boys into preferred masculine roles, schools have always conveyed lessons about being male—unwritten, often unconscious, but nonetheless consequential.
This "hidden curriculum" resides in expectations and attitudes of faculty and staff, as well as in formal school policies and practices, all of which convey that "real" boys are tough and emotionally stoic, independent and autonomous, keen to compete, and eager to prove themselves in feats of risk-taking and aggression. In every school I have visited, social competition and hierarchy, bullying and maltreatment, peer policing, and the marginalization of less-preferred types of boys characterize cultures that even wonderfully committed faculty and staff cannot control.
Raising and educating boys has long been fraught, but never more so than in this time of rapid economic change and shifting gender relations. At the heart of the anxiety that parents and teachers feel, there is the reality that boys exhibit a mixed response to schooling—as they have for many years. Education historian Michele Cohen described a "habit of healthy idleness" evident among boys in the 19th century. Sigmund Freud wrote of complicated relationships between boys and their schoolmasters in the early 20th century. Historically and across great differences in culture, language, and context, the boy who simply will not invest himself in learning has been with us for some time. Yet there is a new sense of urgency about boys' education now in this brave new era of gender equality.
In response, schools have sought to engage boys with more "boy-friendly" subject matter, kinesthetic opportunities, technology, and so forth—on the basis of dubious science and to little avail. As measured by both The National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Programme of International Student Assessment, boys' achievement has remained flat. Meanwhile, steadily improving results for girls reflect the investments made on their behalf.
In their recent research summary, The Rise of Women, Thomas DiPrete of Columbia University and Claudia Buchmann of Ohio State University show that the gender achievement gap begins early, before kindergarten, and grows through primary school years (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013). By 8th grade, according to another team of researchers reviewing Monitoring the Future surveys, boys set lower aspirations for themselves than girls do and put in less educational effort as a result (Fortin, Oreopoulos, & Phipps, 2015).
A Relational Connection
In the rush to import boy-friendly innovations, educators may have missed an important key to engaging boys—one right under our noses. In research conducted in partnership with the International Boys' Schools Coalition, we discovered a well-honed strategy for improving outcomes for boys. In surveying what is already working in classrooms across a wide variety of schools—urban and suburban, state-funded and historically elite—thousands of teachers and adolescent males confirmed that contrary to the stereotypes of young men as diffident, disruptive, or dangerous, most boys care deeply about being successful and simply long for instructors—not to mention schools—capable of connecting personally with them and believing in them, even when they may not believe in themselves and struggle with behavior, effort, or attention problems. Boys' dependence on a relational connection to engage in learning was the inescapable conclusion from our survey. As we wrote: "Relationship is the very medium through which successful teaching and learning is performed with boys."
Particularly revealing was the fact that this finding came primarily from the boys themselves and was less clearly perceived by teachers. Where boys and teachers described similar features of lessons that worked in all other respects, it was the boys who pointed to the quality of a relationship as the make-or-break dimension. Even my research partner and I, veterans of boys' education, were surprised by the clarity of boys' understanding that they need teachers to connect with them. All of us who work in schools, steeped in cultural stereotypes of boys as what we might call "arelational"—not interested in relationships—had trouble knowing what we really should know.
On the flip side, both groups of respondents made it clear that male students often refuse to learn from teachers who cannot see them clearly or who blame them for their difficulties. And a recent study of 150,000 sibling pairs in Florida, researchers found that boys responded to adversity with less resilience than their sisters largely due to attitudes and behaviors learned as males (Autor, et al., 2015). For example, when boys encounter a problem in their relationships with teachers or coaches—a personality conflict, difficulty managing the work, a lack of responsiveness to their needs—they are much more likely than girls to misbehave. At the least, they check out; at worst, they become noisier problems. In this sense, boys are less resilient in relationships than their female classmates are.
Strategies to Engage Boys
In focus groups we conducted, boys described both sides of the relational coin. In response to our question about a teacher they had gotten along well with, one boy began to talk animatedly about how the teacher had "ignited" him. The group spoke of this teacher with something like reverence and described the atmosphere of his classroom as though it were a sacred space. The teacher's presence was not strict or commanding. The seriousness of purpose they felt stemmed from the teacher's own seriousness about his subject—the boys spoke of his "passion"—and the care he took with them. Patient, committed, concerned, and helpful: this was how he was described. "There is just something about him," one of the boys said. "You would be ashamed not to do your work, your best work."
The qualities of successful teachers listed by the teenage boys in our study were consistent across all the different cultures, countries, and types of schools. Both teachers and students cited the following successful strategies:
- Demonstrate a mastery of subject matter. Because it is an instrumental relationship from which boys are looking to learn, the mastery of the teacher was fundamentally important to the working alliance. Teachers must be seen as competent, as invested in their subjects and their pedagogy, and as reliable guides for the learning journey.
- Maintain high standards. Likewise, boys often cited teachers who maintained clear and even demanding standards of classroom conduct and quality of work as those with whom they had the most trust and, overall, the best relationships.
- Respond to a student's personal interest or talent. Another strong theme running through both boys' and teachers' relational accounts was the empowering effect of a boy's realization that his teacher knew him beyond his status as, say, a 7th grade math student.
- Share a common interest with a student. For the reasons discussed above, teachers and boys sharing a personal interest—whether athletic, musical, or mechanical—is a reliable relationship builder, with similar positive effects on scholastic performance.
- Acknowledge a common characteristic with a student. The fact that boy and teacher share a common characteristic—a defining background, ethnicity, a problem overcome—can be a reliable, if serendipitous, relationship builder.
- Accommodate a measure of opposition. Teachers and boys alike reported that teachers who resist personalizing boys' oppositional behavior and instead respond with civility may not only succeed in building relationships, but also create a promising climate for relationship-building classwide.
- Be willing to reveal vulnerability. Although this gesture was reported least frequently, those who did discuss it—both from the boys' and teachers' perspectives—indicated that it can be an important element in relationship-making. For example, teachers found that it strengthened relationships when they apologized to boys with whom they had been cross or mistaken.
When these relational gestures are offered and a learning relationship is struck, teachers can make a profound difference for boys. There is the practical benefit of boys grasping skills or content well enough to pass tests. But there are also transformational benefits from good learning partnerships. When they develop new abilities, boys' self-concepts shift as they come to see possibilities they could not imagine previously. Even more basic, though, is the life-altering lesson that boys absorb from teachers who demonstrate a willingness to go an extra mile on their behalf. They discover that there is help.
Relational Repairs
Absent such connections, many boys are quite willing to check out and act out. Teachers described these boys as unresponsive, inattentive, disrespectful, or downright mean. Instead of trying to fix their relationships with such teachers, boys voted with their feet. As one boy explained about a teacher he felt mistreated him, "I hate him. I'm not doing anything in that class. He can flunk me, they can kick me out—I'm not doing anything." When I asked him why, suggesting that this stance seemed to hurt him more than the teacher, he remained adamant: "I won't do anything for him."
Not only are they vulnerable to relational ruptures, but boys are also unwilling or unable to initiate relational repairs. In a focus group with top student leaders in a high school, the boys explained that the power asymmetry with their teachers and coaches largely paralyzes them when a relationship goes awry. As a result, boys depend on teachers to assume the role of relationship manager. The problem, however, is that boys' resistance when they are offended, frightened, or overwhelmed often manifests in ways that put teachers off. Many teachers defensively conclude that they have done all they can and that it is up to the boy—despite his disadvantages—to take the next step.
The responsibilities of relationship manager raise the stakes in teachers' professional development. Unless teachers can reflect on their relational pedagogy and persist in their efforts to reach resistant boys, they are more likely to disconnect from them, pointing to "laziness," families' lack of support, learning or psychological handicaps, or overwhelming stresses stemming from poverty or racial marginalization. But for every boy whom a teacher gives up on, there are boys with very similar issues who are transformed by another teacher who keeps trying. This is the inconvenient truth about teaching, with special significance for those working with male students: It appears that every boy can be reached.
Several schools that I have worked with have made a commitment to embed relational pedagogy more prominently in their professional learning models. In these schools, teachers are assigned to small professional learning groups that meet at regular times throughout the school year. As teachers observe one another's classes and offer feedback and support, it becomes easier for them to own up when they become overwhelmed, defensive, or angry in relationships with students. Facing up to how these feelings interfere with their relational problem solving, they are less likely to fall back on the default conclusion—that the boy cannot be reached. With peer support and feedback, they are inspired to stretch and to try another approach. A collaborative context for reflective relational practice has proven essential for helping teachers react to challenging male students by relying on relationship management instead of self-protection.
Finally, it is worth noting that the central role of relationships in engaging boys in learning is not new. As the teacher expressed so poignantly in his question about his "lazy" male students, relationships are the main reason most teachers enter the profession. But how boys are affected by cultural norms and how challenging they can become is the subtext for the current gender achievement gap. Fortunately, committed teachers, well-supported by their schools, can work relational magic with such boys—and do so every day, in every school, everywhere.
