When it comes to reading and writing, girls outperform boys.

But for the past three years, one teacher in Nanaimo school district has been splitting the difference in an effort to bridge the gap.

Dave Stupich, now vice-principal at Dover Bay Secondary School, spent the last three years teaching boys-only English classes at Cedar Secondary School.

“I think I’ve found that the Grade 8 level was a good place to start,” he said. “Grade 8 is a pretty tough year for students in terms of transition. A lot of them are not really motivated in English.”

Stupich brought the number of boys meeting minimum expectations in reading and writing from 40 per cent in September up to 100 per cent in January.

“The literature is pretty clear – boys enter Grade 1 about two years behind girls and we’re basically playing catch-up,” he said.

The graduation rate for boys entering Grade 12 in Nanaimo in the 2006/07 school year was 71 per cent compared with 77 per cent of girls.

Stupich said the difference is more pronounced still at the post-secondary level, where about 70 per cent of seats are taken by females. He said boys fall short mainly in courses that involve a heavy amount of reading and writing.

“Girls are more compliant, they will sit down and read,” he said. “They are more sedentary than boys.”

He said eliminating females from the mix in a classroom seems to have removed a major distraction and allowed Stupich to provide a curriculum designed specifically to engage males, with lots of hands-on activities and literature that explores predominantly male themes.

“A Grade 8 boy is not really going to be interested in reading the Diary of Anne Frank,” he said.

Stupich said while this is just something he tried as an individual teacher, he hopes to continue gendered classes in the future.

“It’s on the backburner for a while until I find ways to reintroduce it,” he said. “I put on a workshop at school for staff and it opened some people’s eyes.”

John Phipps, assistant superintendent of educational programs, said the district encourages teachers to try new things at the classroom level to improve student learning outcomes.

“We have a lot of action-based research going on in our schools,” he said.

Junior physical education classes in almost all Nanaimo secondary schools have been divided up by sex for a number of years.

Tom Mason, head of the PE department at Wellington Secondary School, said the school offers gendered classes to some of its Grade 8, 9 and 10 PE classes.

“What we’re looking at there is it gives us the most opportunities of being able to offer skill development opportunities,” he said. “The range of skills is a lot in a coed setting. Girls’ classes tend to like a smaller-sized game so they get more contact with the ball. Boys tend to like to get to a full field game more quickly.”

Leonard Sax, executive director of the U.S.-based National Association for Single Sex Public Education, argues that there are profound differences in the way girls and boys learn.

In his book Why Gender Matters: what parents and teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences, Sax explains that the brain develops differently, the brain is wired differently, girls hear better than boys and both sexes respond to stress in different ways.

He argues that ignoring gender differences has widened the gender gap in some fields – women are much less likely to study computer science or boys history than was the case three decades ago--and that gender blindness has resulted in intensified gender stereotypes.

But Sean Blenkinsop, associate professor in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University and co-director of the Imaginative Education Research Group, said the research comparing gendered education with coed is conflicting.

“The benefits seem to play out in terms of them being more comfortable, being able to connect more,” he said. “But any time you have gender specific classrooms, you’re building on an idea of gender stereotypes.

Blenkinsop said competition within the genders is often a lot stronger than competition with the opposite sex. For example, often boys who do well in school are seen as losers by their peers.

He said a better solution to help boost student achievement is smaller classrooms, where teachers have a chance to get to know students better and work with them one-on-one more often.

“I like the notion of paying teachers to spend time talking with their colleagues about the progress of individual students,” said Blenkinsop. “What we don’t want to do is go, ‘OK, here’s what boys are and here’s what girls are’. What we kind of want to do is give them expanded opportunities to be human.”

reporter@nanaimobulletin.com