Let Me Drive
Jaqueline "Jackie" Spears got tired of making other teachers defensive. In teacher in-service classes, she found that the topic made teachers so uncomfortable that they would just shut down, and math and science teachers did not seem to attend at all. "I became interested in finding ways to talk about the issue so that the teachers would open up instead of shut down," she says in a Kansas State Press Release (2007). Spears, with some help from the NSF, created the Seeing Gender: Tools for change (2005) program (available on CD and on the web).
Among the gender difference claims made by Spears is the concept of "short-circuiting". Teachers and girls both contribute to this pattern. Teachers are more likely to "take over" a task when a girl asks for help, but will explain the task to boys. Girls learn to anticipate this: "girls were more likely to take their hands away from the mouse and keyboard in anticipation of a teacher's help whereas boys keep their hands on the equipment" according to the press release. This is a concern voiced by Keri Logan (2007) as well, who suggests that single-sex classrooms may allieviate boys' tendency to dominate computing courses, although she stresses that teacher involvement is more important. Laura Ann Robertson (2006) quotes a physics teacher: "sometimes the girls let the guys take charge", and suggests that single-sex lab groups may help get girls involved.
The thing that I really like about Spears' work is the emphasis on making teachers aware of their own behavior in the classroom. There are steps that an individual teacher can take to make changes in his or her own classroom. Robertson makes similar suggestions, such as allowing all students more time to answer (it has been suggested that girls don't answer as quickly as boys). The computing class example that Spears offers really spoke to me this morning. I don't instruct students in computing techiniques, but I am often called upon to do so for my coworkers. Whether I take over the computer or not largely depends on whether I think they'll need to do a task unassisted later. If it's a one-time fix, I'm likely to reach over and fix it. I can't think of a specific gender pattern to the way I do this, but I can imagine a similar justification running through the minds of teachers. If they think that girls aren't going to need it, they may be less motivated to help girls understand it. In fact, this is one of the driving ideas behind Robertson's paper -- the idea that teachers may secretly feel that girls don't need physics.
Among the gender difference claims made by Spears is the concept of "short-circuiting". Teachers and girls both contribute to this pattern. Teachers are more likely to "take over" a task when a girl asks for help, but will explain the task to boys. Girls learn to anticipate this: "girls were more likely to take their hands away from the mouse and keyboard in anticipation of a teacher's help whereas boys keep their hands on the equipment" according to the press release. This is a concern voiced by Keri Logan (2007) as well, who suggests that single-sex classrooms may allieviate boys' tendency to dominate computing courses, although she stresses that teacher involvement is more important. Laura Ann Robertson (2006) quotes a physics teacher: "sometimes the girls let the guys take charge", and suggests that single-sex lab groups may help get girls involved.
The thing that I really like about Spears' work is the emphasis on making teachers aware of their own behavior in the classroom. There are steps that an individual teacher can take to make changes in his or her own classroom. Robertson makes similar suggestions, such as allowing all students more time to answer (it has been suggested that girls don't answer as quickly as boys). The computing class example that Spears offers really spoke to me this morning. I don't instruct students in computing techiniques, but I am often called upon to do so for my coworkers. Whether I take over the computer or not largely depends on whether I think they'll need to do a task unassisted later. If it's a one-time fix, I'm likely to reach over and fix it. I can't think of a specific gender pattern to the way I do this, but I can imagine a similar justification running through the minds of teachers. If they think that girls aren't going to need it, they may be less motivated to help girls understand it. In fact, this is one of the driving ideas behind Robertson's paper -- the idea that teachers may secretly feel that girls don't need physics.