http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9285515/site/newsweek/
Boy Brains, Girl Brains
Are separate classrooms the best way to teach kids?

Josh Anderson for Newsweek

Three years ago, Jeff Gray, the principal at
Foust Elementary School in Owensboro, Ky., realized that his school needed
help—and fast. Test scores at Foust were the worst in the county and
the students, particularly the boys, were falling far behind. So Gray took
a controversial course for educators on brain development, then revamped
the first- and second-grade curriculum. The biggest change: he divided the
classes by gender. Because males have less serotonin in their brains,
which Gray was taught may cause them to fidget more, desks were removed from
the boys' classrooms and they got short exercise periods throughout the
day.
Because females have more oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, girls
were given a carpeted area where they sit and discuss their feelings.
Because boys have higher levels of testosterone and are theoretically more
competitive, they were given timed, multiple-choice tests. The girls
were given multiple-choice tests, too, but got more time to complete them.
Gray says the gender-based curriculum gave the school "the edge we needed."
Tests scores are up. Discipline problems are down. This year the fifth and
sixth grades at Foust are adopting the new curriculum, too.-------------

Do Mars and Venus ride the school bus? Gray is part of a new crop of
educators with a radical idea—that boys and girls are so biologically
different they need to be separated into single-sex classes and taught
in different ways. In the last five years, brain researchers using
sophisticated MRI and PET technology have gathered new information
about the ways male and female brains develop and process information. Studies
show that girls, for instance, have more active frontal lobes, stronger
connections between brain hemispheres and "language centers" that
mature earlier than their male counterparts. Critics of gender-based schooling
charge that curricula designed to exploit such differences reinforce
the most narrow cultural stereotypes. But proponents say that unless
neurological, hormonal and cognitive differences between boys and girls
are incorporated in the classroom, boys are at a disadvantage.

Most schools are girl-friendly, says Michael Gurian, coauthor with
Kathy Stevens of a new book,"The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling
Behind in School and Life," "because teachers, who are mostly women,
teach the way they learn." Seventy percent of children diagnosed with
learning disabilities are male, and the sheer number of boys who struggle in
school is staggering. Eighty percent of high-school drop-outs are boys and
less than 45 percent of students enrolled in college are young men. To close
the educational gender gap, Gurian says, teachers need to change their
techniques. They should light classrooms more brightly for boys and
speak to them loudly, since research shows males don't see or hear as well as
females. Because boys are more-visual learners, teachers should
illustrate a story before writing it and use an overhead projector to practice
reading and writing. Gurian's ideas seem to be catching on. More than 185
public schools now offer some form of single-sex education, and Gurian has
trained more than 15,000 teachers through his institute in Colorado Springs.

To some experts, Gurian's approach is not only wrong but dangerous.
Some say his curriculum is part of a long history of pseudoscience aimed at
denying equal opportunities in education. For much of the 19th century,
educators, backed by prominent scientists, cautioned that women were
neurologically unable to withstand the rigors of higher education. Others say basing
new teaching methods on raw brain research is misguided. While it's true
that brain scans show differences between boys and girls, says David Sadker,
education professor at American University, no one is exactly sure what
those differences mean. Differences between boys and girls, says
Sadker, are dwarfed by brain differences within each gender. "If you want to make
schools a better place," says Sadker, "you have to strive to see kids
as individuals."

Natasha Craft, a fourth-grade teacher at Southern Elementary School in
Somerset, Ky., knows the gender-based curriculum she began using last
year isn't a cure-all. "Not all the boys and girls are going to be the
same," she says, "but I feel like it gives me another set of tools to work with."
And when she stands in front of a room of hard-to-reach kids, Craft says,
another set of tools could come in handy.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.