INQUIRY

Why?

I am interested by the effects of gender on how we think and act, and during my short practicum I discovered that my practicum school's Mini School (an enriched program for high achievers) had classes purposely created to have an even split of boys and girls. I decided to take a thorough look at the idea.

In September I walked into my first Inquiry class not knowing what to expect. Although I did not know it, what I had stumbled onto was the core of the group of people who would be my closest allies in the transformation into a practicing teacher. My prof for the class, Kal Heer, immdiately set a tone for playful camaraderie and brilliant mistakes. We were encouraged to go beyond our comfort zones and make new discoveries. As Inquiry I became Inquiry II in the spring, and practicum loomed around the corner, we all used that momentum of going beyond our comfort zones to dig deeper into issues that interested each of us.

The reason for the even split is that girls at a grade 6-7 level tend to be more academically engaged and successful than their same-aged peers who are boys. Usually, the Mini School receives far more applications from prospective students who are girls than those who are boys, and the boys who do apply often lag behind the girls in terms of grades. To keep the even split, some boys with somewhat lesser grades are given spots, while girls who are better candidates than the boys, but did not make the final 15 cut for the girls spots, are left out of the program. At first I was bothered by the idea that a girl would lose her spot to a boy, simply to keep the numbers even. I wondered if there were a benefit to having a perfectly even number, or whether a small imbalance could be beneficial. What I found surprised me.

While I was aware that boys tend to have a lower rate of academic success, this can be somewhat counteracted by either all-boys classrooms, or by classes with a higher percentage of girls, even if the percentage is fairly slight.

The "big question": What are the effects of student gender demographics on the classroom learning environment?

Excerpt from my conclusions:

"I believe that neither single-gender nor gender-parity classrooms are the best, most promising options for creating positive classroom learning (and social) environments. There is support for having classrooms with greater proportions of girls, and that tactic may be a suitable recourse, but only when the best choice – smaller overall class size – is not an option. I was surprised how easily many schools have accepted gender segregation and I question what - if any - thought they have given to how that approach can contribute to the ongoing destructive cycle of reproductions of gendered academic perceptions. I am left wondering what possible unforeseen effects there could be of deliberately constructing classroom compositions with consistently higher percentages of females – as I fear it may have negative outcomes for boys’ self-perceptions of their abilities or belonging within the school community. My question did shift somewhat, looking at the effects of same-sex classrooms and classrooms with higher ratios of girls, but the central focus on the effects of gender composition within classrooms remains dominant."

Connecting to practice:

"While equal numbers do not show as strong positive effects as having a greater ratio of females, the important thing is to have both genders represented, use the power of smaller groups, and hopefully use the feminine gender influence to benefit the whole group. However, this is still a symptom-based strategy. Preferably, I would want to work to deconstruct social gender roles, gender values, and perceptions of gender-based subject aptitudes."