Boys and girls kept apart for class
High school experiments with how it teaches English in effort to close gaps
KITCHENER — It gets loud sometimes in this Grade 10 class. The boys know why. There’s not a girl in the room.
Resurrection Catholic Secondary School is separating boys and girls in appliedlevel English to help them read and write. Girls have their own class.
“It is a bit easier to concentrate in class,” said Emilio Abarca, 14.
“I like it. There’s less of a distraction,” said Robert Brown, 15. “Sometimes it gets a little loud in here, a little silly.”
Boys no longer need to impress girls, said Matthew Dragosits, 14. They’re more confident about speaking up, not worried about what a girl might think.
In other classes “we don’t really want to answer because we don’t want to look dumb in front of them,” he said.
Resurrection is trying to ease a big achievement gap between high school streams. It’s focusing on gender to do this.
This year just 45 per cent of Waterloo Region’s appliedlevel students met the provincial literacy standard the first time they wrote the test. This compares to 92 per cent of academic-level students who met the standard.
Separating boys and girls to ease this gap sounds outdated. But it just might help, says an education professor who has argued against single-sex classrooms in other situations.
“If it’s going to work, this is where it would work,” said Don Klinger, associate dean in the Faculty of Education at
Queen’s University. That’s because while research typically dismisses the effectiveness of single-sex classes, scholars haven’t studied its impact on applied students.
“We do have some evidence that the boys in applied are different than the girls in applied in terms of their learning needs,” Klinger said.
“It’s not that boys’ brains are different than girls’ brains in such a way that boys can’t learn literacy the same way,” said Klinger, who has studied gender differences in Ontario literacy achievement. “It’s more likely to be some sort of social interaction.”
Across the province and the world, wherever boys and girls have equal access to schooling, girls typically outperform boys in literacy tests. This year in this region, 87 per cent of girls but only 76 per cent of boys succeeded the first time they wrote the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test.
Resurrection found that at the academic level, girls test better at literacy than boys. That’s the level where most students study. But the school found that girls studying at the applied level test weaker at literacy than boys.
Klinger suspects this is because some boys are streamed into applied courses due to challenges with behaviour, not learning, whereas girls in applied courses likely have greater learning needs.
To improve the literacy of all applied students, Resurrection girls have been given their own English class taught by a woman. Boys study with a male teacher. The experiment began in the previous school year and continues this year and next. Classes remain co-educational at the academic level.
“We’re recognizing there’s a gap with our applied-level students and we’re taking steps to try and mitigate that,” Resurrection principal Chris Woodcroft said.
Boys and girls read different books in the segregated classes. Last year the girls read a young adult novel titled “Everything, Everything.” It’s about a girl with a rare disease that confines her to her home, until she meets a boy.
“They wanted to read that book,” said Beth Wolf, literacy consultant for the Waterloo Catholic District School Board. “I’m not sure a 14-year-old boy would be interested in that kind of a romance.”
Boys this year are reading a young adult novel titled “Monster.” It’s about a teenage boy on trial for murder.
Matthew Gallagher teaches the boys. He said students succeed when they feel engaged, but worry about how they’ll look in front of their peers. With a class of just boys “they don’t feel judged,” he said.
Wolf recalls teaching girls who fiddled with their hair, letting themselves get distracted. “There were young men in the room and they wanted to show their best side,” she said. “Maybe it’s just a difference in the classroom dynamic because there isn’t a focus potentially on gender.”
Separating boys and girls has shown positive results in the first year but it’s too early to tell if it will improve student literacy, the board says.