Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys Quotes

“Finding Three: Boys Are Relational Learners Perhaps the most revealing and promising finding in our study was one that appeared without our seeking it. We had asked both boys and teachers not to discuss, mention, or name individual persons when they recounted an especially effective scholastic experience. And not a single teacher named or even profiled an individual student. By contrast, almost all of the boys named or profiled teachers. In many cases, boys veered away from discussing the nature of the lesson into deeply feeling responses to the impact a specific teacher had made. There was no single quality or even pattern of qualities singled out in the boys’ responses; they appreciated especially attentive and nurturing teachers in equal measure with daunting taskmasters who displayed an impressive command of their subjects. They celebrated teachers who found ways to be genuinely funny, as well as teachers who freely disclosed their own personal experiences and struggles. Common to all of the accounts in this chorus of praise and appreciation from students was a sense that the teacher in question had somehow seen and known the writer as a distinctive individual. Especially touching were the boys who identified themselves as frustrated and unsuccessful in their studies but experienced a transformation in understanding and motivation as a result of a teacher’s reaching out to him.”
― Michael Reichert, Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies that Work—and Why

“there are clear reasons that boys might continue to disengage and that necessary adjustments are not made. • Boys and girls in class together may elicit different and even contradictory teacher responses, resulting in muddy, only partially successful lessons. • State- or school-mandated protocols may not allow teachers flexibility to adjust their teaching to more effective practices. • There may be insufficient openness on the part of teachers or whole schools to examine actual student-teacher dynamics. • Teachers may lack the empathy or the openness to consider the variety of student responses and instead proceed according to a prescribed method or an eccentrically established personal approach. • Other conditions bearing on students’ lives—troubled homes or a lack of physical or emotional safety—may make their engagement in scholastic activity impossible.”
― Michael Reichert, Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies that Work—and Why

“Another central finding of this study is that boys tend to elicit the pedagogy they need. This point was brought into high relief in the accounts of many teachers who reported that their best lesson was conceived as a result of prior failures to engage boys productively. Boys’ responses to ineffective teaching—disengagement, inattention, disruption, unsatisfactory performance—are intolerable to a conscientious teacher. Such teachers adjust course content, pedagogy, and relational style until student responses improve. Improved responses over time tend to reinforce the adjustments the teacher has made. Or to put it even more simply, resistant student behavior elicits changes in teacher behavior, and when students respond positively to those changes, the teacher retains them as standard practice. From this observation, it follows that when boys succeed in revealing their learning preferences, responsive teachers adjust in a dynamic of continuous improvement.”
― Michael Reichert, Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies that Work—and Why

“In the boys’ accounts of being emotionally and intellectually engaged by their teachers, they convey a sense of being transported, exploring new territory, and feeling newly effective, interested, and powerful. Experienced this way, school is not an institution or an imposition of any kind; it is instead the locus of a particular, often quite personal, learning relationship in which the boy is not so much a “student” as he is fully himself, only incidentally at school.”
― Michael Reichert, Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Strategies that Work—and Why