Some boys, believing that they’ll never get recognition for any academic output, will try to seek attention by playing up in class. Pinkett’s Damascene moment came a few years into his teaching career while discussing a poem with a female colleague. She said the way he interpreted it was down to the fact that, as a man, he thought about sex the whole time. “It was acceptable sexism, because it was directed at a man not a woman,” says Pinkett. “And it made me realise that, though girls and women undoubtedly come off worse as a result of sexist assumptions, boys and men are damaged by them, too.” Boys (and girls) have more respect for teachers who know their stuff. Being an expert in your subject (or subjects) is a must.

I was teaching poetry to a low set year 9 class, many of whom had previously expressed very negative ideas about the police, often in reference to their own dealings with them at the weekend. As a department we had already selected a collection of ‘disturbed voices’ poetry, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to engage some key boys in the year. In this lesson, I decided to get students to respond to Armitage’s ‘Hitcher’ in the form of a police interview. I asked their opinions and they helped me rephrase the writing frame to make it ‘more realistic’. As I had hoped, the boys showed interest and produced more writing than they often did. Yet, clearly I was guilty of the becoming a ‘cultural accomplice’, merely reinforcing the idea that they, as disadvantaged boys, were natural ‘troublemakers’, certainly not analytical thinkers or, god-forbid, the kind of students who might actually like poetry. The inspector, incidentally, told me that the task was excellently engaging, but clearly judged the students for their in depth knowledge of police procedures. Chapter 10: Other Voices– This was a slightly different chapter made up of short sections written by a variety of authors – teachers, leaders and parents – each with very their own stories to tell. I had to listen to this again (not on a walk) to take a note of all the quotes in it! Stephanie Keenan is head of English at Ruislip High School. She blogs here and tweets @HeadofEnglish To get boys putting pen to paper, teachers need to have relentless high expectations when it comes to what you want them to produce. As a reader, it’s a scary moment when it dawns that these strategies were doing more harm than good. The World Cup of Writing created more losers than winners. The sports text reinforced stereotypes of masculinity and prevented students from building cultural capital. In one colleague’s maths lesson, the boys remembered far more about pizza toppings than the formula for calculating the area of a circle.Schools are not the only drivers with regards to societal norms around gender but they certainly have the opportunity to dispel archaic workplace gender stereotypes.”

Similarly, the author makes a cogent argument for not making all boys’ learning “relevant”. First, he refers to cognitive social scientist Daniel T Willingham’s example of how content doesn’t always drive interest. For instance, we’ve all attended an event or lecture we thought would be boring but ended up being fascinating. As Roberts and Pinkett make clear throughout Boys Don’t Try, high expectations are far more useful to build student self-esteem. Similar classes I’ve taught more recently have completed the same tasks as top sets, with often just as good results. Again supporting Roberts’ assertion that setting is rarely just about ability. Be clear on exactly what you want everybody to produce and praise boys discreetly when they meet your demands. He is a strong believer in the school’s role in adding to a student’s “cultural capital” – the idea that we accumulate certain knowledge valued in society that gives us cultural competence and determines our social status. It can be concluded, then, that boys’ underachievement at school, and the social, biological and cultural forces that give rise to it, form part of a worrying trajectory for boys as they mature and become men.The two schools-based authors write chapters in turn. In chapter one, Mark Roberts tells of his early success as a teacher with a reputation for teaching boys well and describes his popular classroom strategies. But which boys are affected? It’s really the working-class boys who experience the most difficulties. Working-class boys are more likely to get caught up in a negative dynamic of acting out and being reprimanded and then becoming disengaged.” Competition is questioned through the fear it can also engender: “If I don’t try, then I can’t fail,”“If I write nothing, then I’ve written nothing wrong.” Chapter 5: Expectations– Unsurprisingly, I’ve now decided I need to buy a physical copy of this book. I also need to read up on Mary Myatt’s work highlighting changing the language from “ability” to “attainment”. I found the whole mixed ability over setting section really interesting. As highlighted earlier, I would love to find out about secondaries that are making this work as I use this mixed ability approach in my primary class. (If you know of any secondaries that use a mixed ability approach – please let me know!)