This week, an answer to a subscriber’s question we received last week:
“I and other colleagues have noticed that our year 7 students arrive to us with already fixed ideas about boys and girls as a divide. This has only started becoming the case over the past 3 or 4 years. They are very resistant to working with each other, some becoming mute if they have to. I wondered if this is something that has been raised before and whether you have any thoughts on this?”
Like many of you will have, we’ve observed the same about the gender split getting worse lately. It’ll be the consequence of lots of factors, many are out of our control, but there are some we can mitigate in our own teaching.
Below, we’ve listed three of our go-to strategies when we’re in this situation in the classroom. Hopefully you can find them as easy to implement as we do and also see the same heartening results.
1.Debate Games
Fear Factor: Even the classroom isn’t immune to rules of the playground – a set of inherited social boundaries and norms reinforced by societal conditioning. It’s very hard for children to break ranks because it risks losing face.
Antidote: Play a game that compels engagement from everyone. Our go-to is Argumentag Wrestling, which you can see Jason explain to teachers in the video below, or read about here.
Why this works: A game like Argumentag creates a new set of “game-rules” that will temporarily override or suspends the social rules. Although children can be fiercely stubborn about certain things, they generally obey the rules of a game becaus their inbuilt desire to maintain or increase their social standing. You lose social standing by being seen as a cheat, but you can increase your social standing by winning fairly.
2. Lower-stakes questions
Fear Factor: If you’re trying to save face, you don’t want to say anything that risks getting ridiculed or judged. And the risk of this will be highest when we’re being asked a question that carries some weight.
Antitode: Small Talk Before Big Talk. Decrease the scale or complexity of the question in the early stages of the discussion. Make the first thing they talk about more silly than serious, and increase the weight of the questions from there.
Which is smarter, a dog or a fox?
All farmed animals should be free range
No animal should be farmed for its meat.
Could a robot replace a pet?
Could a robot replace a teacher?
Could a robot replace a friend?
A good warm-up game example is Ping-Pong Proverbs. Explain what a proverb is, and then model going back and forth with a partner one word at a time, creating new piece of wise (or more usually, ridiculous!) advice. It helps to start with “always” or “never”. Once they’ve had a go in pairs, snowball into fours, eights… perhaps the whole class?
Why this works: When did you last have a meeting where the very first thing you spoke about was the subject of the meeting? Unless you are getting fired or firing someone, it almost never happens. A meeting without preliminary small talk lacks the human touch. Yet when we get children to work in groups, we don’t usually leave any space for that small talk to take place. We assume that they are primed and ready to talk about whatever we want them to talk about. Going for a low-stakes question allows everyone to access a speech-confident version of themselves. The activity is temporary, but the impact can be lasting, as those barriers to speech are broken down by arguing about something completely frivolous!
3. Team Building Tasks
Fear Factor: A skill can remain hidden in the classroom because students don’t feel they’ve got the social permission to step forward and show it. Kids of both genders can be afraid of coming across like a bit of a swot, especially if they’re just answering a question and the answer appears to serve no purpose beyond showing the teacher, and therefore the rest of the class, how much they know.
Antitode: Consider adding some team-building games to your form/pastoral time. I (Tom) wrote a whole book on this, Table-Top Team Building, you can download a free sample of some of the team-building games here.
Why this works: These kind of games may get associated with cringe, but team-building tasks are still so popular because not only do the help a team bond, but they are often where peope find their voice. They allow people to show hidden skills or knowledge that wouldn’t have otherwise come to the fore. And because the team wants to complete the task, everyone’s got social permission to step forward, and doesn’t come across as at all swotty to do so. And if you need proof, just watch some of the missions on the recent series of The Celebrity Traitors!
Whilst games like this only lasts a finite amount of time, if done properly and often enough, you’ll see the boundaries being broken down as they become more familiar with talking to one another.
Other thoughts
It’s also worth remembering that some of the reasons that stop boys talking to girls are also going to be some of the reasons why some of the boys don’t talk to other boys (and vice versa for the girls). There will be a fair amount of intra-gender speaking fear as well as inter-gender speaking fear, but because of confirmation bias, we probably only notice the inter-gender speaking fear more. All of the strategies above, as well as all of those in our books and INSET, help address both.
And it’s not just about those activities which invite students to speak to one another. It’s our duty to explicitly remind them about the importance of talking to everyone. I still remember the day when I was in Year 4 myself and I was asked to shake hands with the girl in my class who’d just been my tennis partner. When I (embarrassingly) rolled my eyes in a kind of mock indignation, I’ll never forget the disappointed look my teacher gave me, which basically said, “Oh grow up, stop being such an idiot.” That really stuck with me!
What have we been up to?
This week, Jason was one of the main speakers at the Essex Primary Heads Association Small Schools Conference. With the wonderful organiser Pam, we’ve arranged a “Small Schools Big Zoom”, which invites Essex small schools to join an intensive 1-hour online oracy training, for a fraction of the cost of what it would cost to get us into school. If you’re a small school with a very limited budget (or even better, in a network of small schools), and this sort of model might interest you, get in touch, and we’ll see what we can put together for you.
Tom’s been visiting Bodiam Castle this week, where he’s been commissioned by the National Trust to put together a new schools pack. He’s been watching how children interact with the castle at the moment. Lots of fascinating observations and new ideas for how to help future visiting schools.