{ the education review }
B
efore Ahmad arrived at Imagine last school year to teach the boys, she knew little about single-sex education. She had received her master’s
degree in 2009 and expected to spend her first year in the classroom as a co-teacher, learning from the boys’ first-grade teach- er, Jamahr McDaniel. But McDaniel was promoted to assistant principal early in the school year, and Ahmad was sudden- ly teaching on her own. To prepare, she read whatever she
could find. “It makes a lot of sense, because boys and girls do learn differ- ently,” Ahmad says. “Someone asked me recently if I could teach girls, and I said, ‘I don’t know if I could. I’m used to how boys learn, and if I switched classes, I would have to do everything the op- posite. The boys are so energetic and spunky — and I love that.’ ” Pointer also knew nothing about sin-
gle-sex education when she was hired at Imagine last year. But she was intrigued enough to give it a try and asked for a girls’ class. “I wanted experience teach- ing the girls, because I thought it would be good to work on their self-esteem and build them up,” she says. Both teachers said they were eager
to learn more about single-sex educa- tion when they were chosen with other teachers from their school to attend a weekend conference in South Carolina. It is a sunny Saturday in early spring
when the Imagine group files into the cafeteria of a middle school in Moncks Corner, about 33 miles north of Charles- ton. They are in town for the South Carolina Department of Education’s fourth annual Teacher-to-Teacher Con- ference on Single-Gender Initiatives. South Carolina leads the way on
single-sex education. Thousands of chil- dren throughout the state are enrolled in 160 participating public schools, and another 160 schools are weighing the option for the fall. South Carolina teachers are con-
ducting the workshops for 400 fellow educators from around the country. The participants have their choice of sessions, including “Smart, Sassy, and Stylish: Gender-specific procedures and strat- egies that can be used in the all girls elementary curriculum,” “Mean Girls:
Building Community In An All Girls Classroom,” “Using the Glorious Gift of Gab and Glitter: How to use what comes naturally to girls to enhance class- room instruction,” “Throw it, catch it, make it move: Teaching middle school boys through movement,” and “Boys and Literacy.” Ahmad starts the morning in the lit-
eracy session, where Brandy Caroway and Robert Nunnery, middle school teachers from Lancaster, S.C., begin with a statement: “Boys don’t like to read.” Teachers who believe this state- ment is true are asked to move to the right side of the room; those who think
brains react differently to stress. It in- creases the blood flow to the brain of a male and helps him remain alert, while decreasing the blood flow to the brain of a girl, leaving her not quite ready for learning, the speakers said. David Chadwell, coordinator for sin-
gle-gender initiatives for South Carolina’s Department of Education, is behind the changes in his state. More pragmatist than evangelist, he is using single-gen- der education as a backdoor approach to raise the quality of teaching in South Car- olina, where fourth-graders rank 33rd in the nation in reading and 34th in math. “One of the nice things about single-
it is false move to the left. Half of the 40 teachers make their way to the right; Ahmad joins the teachers on the left. Caroway surveys the room and
announces: “Actually, reading is a moder- ately popular activity for boys.” Research shows that boys like to read at school if the text is interesting, the environment is right, if they have read often, or have been read to frequently at home and have a positive attitude about it, she says. Pointer opts to attend a later work-
shop called “Ladybug Girls: Building a Strong Community in an All-Girls Class.” The first-grade teacher who led the session refers to students as her lit- tle “ladybugs,” decorates her class in red and black, and emphasizes community- building, an idea that Pointer says she strives to create in her own classroom. Ahmad and Pointer also learned that
girls should be given a longer time than boys to complete tasks because their
18 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | august 8, 2010
gender classes is that we require more training in general for these teachers,” he says. “And there is more buy-in from teachers this way. ‘Try some of these things and see what happens,’ we tell them, and then they’ll listen to more substantial training about classroom effectiveness.” Much of the training for single-sex
education, he says, “is just about good teaching.”
F
inding, training and retaining good, experienced teachers is a problem that dogs educa- tors across the country. Critics of single-sex education say
teacher quality is at the core of the prob- lem with failing schools and that instead of addressing that issue, educators resort to tactics such as separating children in classrooms by gender. “Schools are just looking around
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