Summer 2006

Innovation in education

Boys kick a goal

Paul van Campenhout takes a close look at an award-winning program and one school’s curriculum-based approach to dealing with the learning needs of a particular group of boys.

An experiment in educating boys has been attempted in a leafy suburb of Canberra for the last two years. All indicators show that the program has had a positive impact on the lives of the targeted students, re-engaging them in their own learning.

Lyneham High School, located in the inner-northern suburbs of Canberra, is a success story in its own right. It has built its reputation on a solid basis of academic rigour, sporting success and innovative opportunities in the Arts.

One group of students wasn’t quite getting it though and that worried the teachers at the school. This group of around 30 boys did not engage in the social and academic life of the school, in fact they seemed to be cast adrift. Classes seemed to chafe at them and attendance rates were poor. A love of sport was a key feature of their lives, but they were more excited about playing footy at lunch than competing in organised teams. Teachers agreed that academically they just weren’t meeting their potential. More frightening was the realisation that these boys were struggling with their image of masculinity and that most of them had no real idea of what it meant to be male. In fact, it seemed like they were making up the script as they went along, cherry picking elements of popular culture and combining that with what little mentoring they received at home. The result was a culture that was beginning to form around violence, low self-respect and with the ever-increasing spectre of substance abuse.

A group of teachers identified that something needed to be done. They realised that despite working in a school with high success rates, the fact that these students were missing out was still a cause for concern.

The result was the RADICAL program or ‘Resilience and Adolescent Development In Culture and Leadership’ (which soon became shortened to RAD). This innovative program was developed by teachers Brendan Magee, Brenton Mikk and Anthony Batten. It has changed the lives of these boys and has shone a light on best practice that can be used not only with similar groups of students but can improve the learning of all students.

The first step for the RAD teachers was to find the best practice research on boy’s education and to see how that could apply to their particular situation. Brendan Magee (a recipient of a Teaching Australia Award in 2005 for his work on the program) was completing his Masters of Education at the time and modifying that to this task was simple. From the written works of Steve Biddulph in Raising Boys to Andrew Martin’s seminal work on educating boys completed for the ACT Department of Education, Improving the Educational Outcomes of Boys, the message seemed to be clear. To truly engage with boys (and therefore, all students), it was important to discover where they were ‘at’ and then tailor a program designed or differentiated to meet their particular needs.

The success of the RAD program can really be brought down to the fact that the teachers took the time to get to know their students and then were able to use the curriculum to meet their needs.

The curriculum in the course initially centred on the theme of the student. What type of person were they? What type of learner were they? Then the questions of masculinity were raised. What do you think it means to be a man? What role do men play? What is real leadership?

The answers to these questions, while slow at first, came in a torrent as the students became more at ease with the program. Eventually the teachers had abundant information about the students as learners and indirectly as individuals and community members. It was possible to really know about the goals of the students and therefore to manipulate curriculum content that met those goals.

Was this a function of the RAD class that is totally specific to that group? The short answer is no. The RAD group had the advantage of being isolated, but it was the curriculum that acted as the tool for getting to know the learning needs of the students in the class. Why use any other method? The benefits of incorporating a degree of metacognition into the delivered program had tangible benefits for the teachers in that they had a tool that readily informed them of the needs that the students recognised in their own approach to learning. Once that was done, the teachers had a roadmap that would enable them to plan curriculum to the needs of the students.

This group of boys had long been victims of stereotyping from both staff and other students, yet they were also masters at stereotyping each other. The curriculum was designed to break that down—to remove the preening and showboating that had formed their view of masculinity.

What is the benefit of all this? These boys had been masters at hiding weaknesses. While the boys were metacogitating they were also getting to know each other as people. This, in the long term, has led to a broader level of understanding and support within the classroom. Student management issues are now almost non-existent and the students see the classroom as a safe space where they can freely share ideas and discuss issues—a first for many of the boys.

Is this transferable? Well, it’s certainly worth a try! The first step is students learning about their own learning and teachers using that to build a map of learning needs. Is this a phenomenon that is solely going to work with boys? Of course it isn’t, yet the idea would be foreign to many teachers who see the curriculum as a tyrant, standing over them demanding precious time that the teacher knows is slipping away. Getting to know the learning needs of students is too valuable to simply gloss over it, or assume that it will become self-evident through the normal day-to-day teaching cycle.

So far, the results of the RAD program show that it is worth the time. Literacy and numeracy rates have increased across the group without exception. Students are engaged in their learning. Students actually want to come to school and have modified their behaviour across the school to maintain their place in the class. Those are tangible results that can all be traced back to empirical data. Qualitatively though, the change is even more dramatic. The students see the need for school, they appreciate the effort of the teachers and they have meaning to their learning again, after a long break away.

The program is now coming up to its most important test. The initial teacher team is breaking up as teachers change and move to new challenges. The students are changing as well and the program will need to change to reflect the needs of the new students. Even if the program was to totally change, the fact remains that the lessons of differentiation and meeting the needs of the learner have made a positive effect on the lives of these students and have changed the pedagogy of the involved teachers for the better.

Paul van Campenhout is a curriculum officer in the ACT Department of Education and Training.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au