One of the educators who just completed an online course with us did a project that sparked my interest by offering some views about boys, reading, and character development. This teacher reviewed 15 books with interesting and motivating stories about values and virtues and suggested how teachers could use the stories to teach reading skills and positive character traits. This project reminded me of my own reading experiences and my teaching of elementary and middle school boys.
I did not like to read when I was in school. In fact, I was a poor/slow reader. I know this because in my elementary grades there were no girls in my reading group. It was my assumption that the girls were better readers. The teacher usually sat the boys together and gave us our reading lessons just before recess. Our theory was that our teacher needed an immediate break after spending a half hour or so trying to spark our interest in reading and trying to teach us the skills of reading.
Yet I did read. I was a newspaper carrier (about 100 customers) and every day I would read the sport pages, the comic pages, about the war, and sometimes other parts of the newspaper. But this kind of reading was not what my teachers had in mind. They were into literature and books. I liked to read newspapers and some magazines and go to the movies. I read my first complete book (The Old Grey Homestead) the summer I graduated from high school. I have been catching up ever since.
My experiences confirm what is reported in the research that suggests that girls perform better than boys on literacy assessment and that the gap between the two increases with age. I also found another research result—that boys see reading as a “girls” activity and “in conflict with their sense of masculinity.” Other researchers note boys have difficulty “understanding narrative text, but do better with informational text.” (Was that why I liked reading newspapers daily?)
As I look back at my early teaching years I recall that the boys in our school who were experiencing literacy problems were more than likely to be held back a grade; to be involved in bullying, violence, and unruly behavior in classes; to be suspended or expelled; to be in detention hall; to be in reading clinics and special reading programs; and, it seemed at the time, to drop out before completing high school.
I remember how Stan (the math teacher), Alice (the school reading specialist) and I decided that we would try instructional strategies that would play to the boys’ interests, needs, and learning styles with more project-based experiences (we didn’t call it project-based learning at that time), more real-life materials (newspapers, magazines, etc.), and more hands-on lessons. We also focused on their motivations and attitudes, their behavior and such social skills as manners, courtesy, and respect. Recently I read that successful literacy programs are able to teach at-risk students to make connections between their lives and what they know, and to engage in conversations about what they are reading and their own lives. We tried to do this.
So, for many boys, there is a need to teach them literacy skills such as reading, writing, and communication at the same time that they are taught behavioral skills such as respect, responsibility, self-discipline, manners, and courtesy.
By Ed DeRoche, Ph.D.
