Other chapters look at mental health, violence and aggression, or the problems caused by “banter”– offering ways to develop more positive relationships in lessons. yes thats all dandy, but male suicide is almost nothing to do with men not talking, rather it is life experiences that disproportionately affect men and also a massive lack of resources, funding, and overall compassion. A gender gap in educational attainment means boys get lower exam results than girls, are more likely to drop out, and are less likely to go to university than their female counterparts.

However, simply looking around my classroom at the wonderfully different characters Ihad in front of me suggested these solutions were not really solutions at all: boys are not all the same. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I decided to try out Gretchen Rubin’s strategy of pairing in an attempt to develop the habit of going for a walk every day. Share your own review… Have you read a good book lately with relevance to provision for more able learners? What is new for teachers thinking about more able and talented provision is the urgency with which we are persuaded to be gender-blind in our judgements, which should make our assessments of need and ability more responsive.

Roberts argues this hyper-competitive spirit breeds a self-destructive behaviour in boys that results in them “downing” the textbooks to protect their self-esteem: “If I haven’t tried, I haven’t really failed,” is the thinking behind this. I would have welcomed the authors’ views on how the British educational establishment has viewed this issue, and how this might overlap or differ in other countries. Limiting boys’ exposure also has the clear knock-on effect of preventing boys from building cultural capital and promoting dominant ideas about masculinity. Pinkett concludes with case studies of how to deal well with incidents of sexism or degrading language, such as students using the word “rape” or “paedo” in class.

The inspector, incidentally, told me that the task was excellently engaging, but clearly judged the students for their in depth knowledge of police procedures. I was teaching poetry to a low set year 9 class, many of whom had previously expressed very negative ideas about the police, often in reference to their own dealings with them at the weekend. There are different ways of being a boy, just as there are different ways of being a girl, when learning to manage one’s experience as a learner. He says he mistakenly thought, when he taught in an inner‑city comprehensive in Manchester, that boys’ underachievement was connected to deprivation. Competitive lessons create losers not just winners, leading to boys’ withdrawal from academic competition as a self-protection strategy: “if I haven’t tried, I haven’t really failed”.Sometimes, this might mean ‘spoon-feeding’ an answer to a boy in a 1:1 chat and then asking him to tell the class the answer in a whole class discussion later on so he can experience the pleasure of ‘being right. Appreciated the mention of teacher modelling openly talking about their emotions and shoulder-shoulder talks, which made me think of a Pivotal podcast that I listened to in my first year of teaching and has stayed with me since. With humility, but not the masochism that sometimes goes with teachers’ blogs, they trace the changes that experience has required of their thinking and practice.