Weekend Reading: Gender and Sustainability
This occasional series, Weekend Reading, offers suggestions for books, articles, and research papers that can foster professional growth. This latest installment features resources that address two issues of great importance in my middle school (and hopefully education in general); gender responsive teaching and sustainability.
Does Gender Matter in Education?
The current issue of ASCD Express explores the role gender plays in the learning environment. Administrators, teachers, and researchers share how gender can affect teaching and learning and what public, private, and charter schools are doing to deal with these issues. For those in coeducational settings, this video segment provides an introductory glimpse into the single-gender classroom:
Having spent the majority of my career teaching males and females separately, I found the success stories, tips, and research summaries in ASCD Express invaluable and refreshing. Regardless of your teaching environment, gender does matter and makes for engaging reading.
Fostering Sustainable Behavior
Beyond being a major component of our school’s Strategic Plan, sustainability is an issue of global importance. Fostering Sustainable Behavior is a free online book that, “details how to uncover the barriers that inhibit individuals from engaging in sustainable behaviors. Further, it provides a set of “tools” that social science research has demonstrated to be effective in fostering and maintaining behavior change. Each of these tools in and of its own right is capable of having a substantial impact upon the adoption of more sustainable behaviors. Collectively, they provide a powerful set of instruments with which to encourage and maintain behavior change.”
Written with the intent of fostering programmatic change under the guise of “community-based social marketing”, the lessons in Fostering Sustainable Behavior can be incorporated into curriculum and instruction and applied at various scales (individual, classroom, school-wide). For more information and resources, visit author and Environmental Psychologist Doug McKenzie-Mohr’s website.
Happy Reading!
March 28th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
The video and articles only adds to what we here at MICDS have know for years, that single gender classrooms has its benefits in behavior management and increased confidence for both boys and girls. As far as better grade assessment, this is hard to say since we have no data on grades before single sex classes. It also raises the same concern we have in as far as stereotyping behavior. We need more and better research in this area of education.
June 2nd, 2010 at 11:50 am
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