I Can Learn From You: Boys as Relational Learners
Michael Reichert and Richard Hawley
Harvard Education Press (2014)

How to forge and manage “mutually respectful, purposeful relationships with [most] students

Michael Reichert and Richard Hawley wrote this book in order to share what they learned from a relational teaching study of 35 single-sex boys schools in Australia (5), Canada (5), New Zealand (3), South Africa (5), United Kingdom (6), and United States (11).

“We conducted this study of relationship’s place in the scholastic fortunes of boys in response to mounting indications that boys, in the aggregate, are not thriving scholastically. We knew also that, those dire indicators notwithstanding, some boys in some schools — schools of all types — were not only thriving but excelling. More hopeful still: some boys in some schools were transformed from unsuccessful, resistant students to achieving scholars. We wanted to know in what circumstances and in what settings those positive transformations occurred and if that knowledge might be portable to other schools.”

Here are my five key takeaways from Reichert and Hawley’s lively as well as substantial narrative:

o Paraphrasing Theodore Roosevelt, boys don’t care how much their teachers know until they know how much their teachers care.

o Paraphrasing Herb Kelleher, the best schools (in terms of personal growth and educational development) take great care of their teachers, teachers take great care of their students, and students take great care of the learning community they all share..

o Both formal and informal learning should be relational and reciprocal.

o Educators are “gardeners” who primary purpose is to “grow” happy, healthy, and productive students.

o An African proverb suggests that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a learning community to “forge and manage mutually respectful, purposeful relationships” between and among everyone involved.

However different schools may be (public, private, single sex, boarding, day, etc.), all of them should have an environment within which relational learning is most likely to thrive.  Michael Reichert and Richard Hawley explain HOW. I highly recommend their book to all who have direct and frequent contact with boys and, yes, with girls. There really is so much to learn from them and they can learn from each each other.