My experience in recent curriculum research has been that we, as a collective educational system, continue to ignore the ways in which boys learn best. We expect "good students" to sit and listen, and to collaborate and plan, rather than to do what boys do; take action and compete.
The school where I'm teaching has never offered coed education for the middle school years; even when the upper schools, originally separate boys' and girls' prep schools on the same campus, were made one coed school, the middle schools remained single-sex. Research indicated that high school girls were more confident and willing to speak their mind in class when they'd had a chance to have a single-sex experience in middle school. However, it has become clear that these years are equally valuable for the boys, who are not ready for the social interaction that the girls introduce. Both genders are far more focused apart from each other, and more empowered both academically and socially. Still, we must continue to consider both genders' learning styles as we develop a media-rich curriculum as well as the assessment and reporting tools to accompany it.
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