CHALLENGE (4)
Getting him to take up challenges
Before you can help a boy take up challenges, you need to know what may be standing in the way of him actually doing it.
- First of all , he needs to believe he has the personal resources to meet the challenge. And remember, because of testosterone that belief needs to be proved by experience for a boy.
- As well the challenge needs to be the right size, with a clear time frame.
- Finally downtime or rewards that will follow upon its completion. Remember that for
millennia males have developed the ability to intensely focus for defined periods of time. However, this effort uses a lot of cognitive energy that can drain males and could be one reason that male brains at rest have so much less activity going on—they are “recharging”for the next challenge. The image of the caveman staring at the fire after the hunt seems to be a perfect illustration for this. For modern males, this “recharging” can be observed in relaxation activities such as reading the paper, watching TV, playing repetitive video games, aimlessly shooting baskets, kicking a soccer ball, or hanging out in ways that require moderate physical exertion. Whatever it is, knowing that this downtime is coming is crucial to males undertaking challenges. Even more importantly it give s boys time to process their achievement and increases their desire to take on future challenges.
TO TRY THIS WEEK…
Involve students in task planning – Although the classroom curriculum can often be specifically prescribed for teachers, the great freedom and joy of teaching is creating context. The great teachers of our lives created a context in which we learned with passion. The best way to do this with today’s students is to involve them in planning how they will learn the necessary material. Although this may appear time-consuming at first, it actually allows for much faster, more effective learning—and performance on tests! The passion generated by such an approach can be surprising for teachers.
One teacher told me that when he asked a boy-heavy classroom to come up with a challenging way to learn a science concept, he was blown away by how hard the students were willing to work: “They set much more stringent and rigorous goals for the class success in the concept than I would have—or than was required by the curriculum—and then they set about accomplishing them. I just had to get out of the way. Most intriguing of all, those who took the greatest leadership were those kids I had pegged as terminally lazy!” The recent movement of schools toward Project-Based Learning (PBL) provides a great support for this approach.
Here is a neat article by a teacher who used Project Based Learning with good success:
