http://www.lcni5.com/cgi-bin/storyviewarchive.cgi?151+2008220.Opinion.2008215-3226-151-151029.archive+Opinion
This is a link to my hometown's local newspaper. Lancaster county is considering offering single gender classes to its students. About 90 school districts in our state are experimenting with the single gender classrooms and have found the results to be positive for learning. I think that it is interesting that schools are trying this method for teaching and that the results have found that boys and girls respond so differently to types of learning. I am not exactly sure I agree with it for all subjects but if it helps children learn better than I support it.
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The thing that caught my attention about this article is that boys and girls learn in the different manners as reported. I personally had no prior knowledge of that. I think that as long as no concern about segregation of the genders were to be raised, then this concept would work well. Although the article seems to generalize how the different genders learn, I still wouldn't see an issue with it other than the one I mentioned before.
I feel that the seperation of gender is not a bad idea. Schools have a history of seperating genders, particularly Catholic schools. Winthrop started as an all girls school itself. Teenagers might be well served by this seperation due to their raised self-conciousness during the onset of puberty. The fact that girls generally mature more quickly than boys, and they do have different learning tendencies only serve as a starting point for looking further into the advantages of such a system.
I think that this effort is definatly worth a try. One of the topics that I am researching for a different class is gender differences in math. Math is a subject that has traditionally been stereotyped as "harder for girls" even though this is not necessarily true. Single gender classes may help to remove some of the stereotype threat that co-ed classes may introduce. What will be interesting to see is which gender this will help (or hinder) the most. Removal of stereotype threat may help most girls to perform better (since they generally have mastery oriented goals according to research.) If single gender classes are introduced, I wonder how different the teaching styles would be between the male classes and the female classes after a few years?
Because I am the teacher and my job is to be devil's advocate, I will say:
1. We need to be very careful we don't reify gendered teaching styles. I see this trend as saying "girls learn this way and boys learn this other way". In fact, different individuals learn different things differently. SOME girls may benefit by learning MATH in this particular way, but some boys may benefit from learning math that same way, too.
2. Is this really necessary? Many important indicators show that women, at least, are doing just fine.
3. We need to be clear about our goals for this. Is it better academic achievement or for social benefits? One is easily measurable, one not so much. Can we have both? What is the priority?
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