The middle grades seem to mark a time when students become preoccupied, sometimes exclusively, with the impression they make on the opposite sex. Yet, at Marshall, there are 50 seventh graders who do not have to concern themselves with this issue during class time.

These students are part of a team in which the teachers have been together for five years, making theirs one of the veteran teams in the school. Even with years of experience behind them, these teachers are hardly set in their ways. Quite the contrary, they are constantly looking for new ways to adapt instruction, curriculum, and scheduling to help their students make academic progress. One of these adaptations was to form two single-gender classes.

Kathy Panagakis, one of the team's language arts and social studies teachers, first grouped her classes by gender three years ago, when she and her previous teaching partner (a man) decided to be intentional about having mentoring relationships with their students. They reasoned that putting the students in all-boy and all-girl classes would allow each group to discuss its thoughts and feelings more openly, and it would foster the right atmosphere for mentoring. After the first month, not only were teacher-student relationships strengthened, but both classes had also made significant academic gains. The girls in particular became more engaged in their schoolwork once they were able to express their opinions freely in class discussions and in journals.

Given the flexibility that teams have with scheduling, the reconfiguration of classes into all-boy and all-girl groups was not difficult to manage. The teachers in this team had already regrouped the entire team of students into two "sub-teams," each of which was assigned two teachers, one for math and science, the other for social studies and language arts/reading. With this arrangement, it became possible for each teacher on the team to work with 50 to 60 students instead of 100 or 120. The single-gender configuration is not set in stone; is implemented only if it is clear that it will benefit the students. Before meeting their incoming group of seventh graders, Ms. Panagakis and her current teaching partner, Ms. Sánchez, decided to keep the boys and girls together during the first quarter of the 1999 - 2000 school year. By the second quarter, once it became clear that the daily boy-girl distractions were impeding the students' academic progress, they chose to reconfigure into single-gender classes.

During the third quarter of the year, the girls in Ms. Sánchez's math class hardly noticed when a visitor entered the room; they were so intent on completing the task their teacher had given them. They had been studying the concept of area, and for this class Ms. Sánchez had given them an activity through which they would discover that the area of a hexagon is the same as the area of a square. The students were focused on cutting a paper hexagon into smaller pieces and then manipulating the pieces to fit into the shape of the square. Faces lit up around the room as each girl found a successful configuration. Before too long, one girl noticed that the arrangement that worked for her neighbor was different from the one she had put together. "There's more than one answer!" she announced to the class. Pleased by her student's discovery, Ms. Sánchez reminded the class of another concept they had been learning all year, "Always look for other ways to solve a problem."

Across the hallway, Ms. Panagakis was having an animated conversation with her social studies class on living conditions in the Middle Ages. There was not much elbowroom for the students, with all 25 boys squeezing their desks together around the perimeter of the class. As they added their comments to the discussion, many of them sprawled their arms beyond their own space and onto a neighbor's desk. No one protested at this behavior, and no one looked remotely self-conscious. In a word, the mood was comfortable. Knowing there were just 20 minutes remaining in the school day, Ms. Panagakis engaged her class with a thought-provoking question, "Is it better to be a gang member or to be a serf?" One boy contended that though gang life is not ideal, it is a big improvement over the lot of a serf. A few desks down, his friend countered, "The lords gave serfs land and protection for working hard. All you get in a gang is jail, drugs, and" . . . his voice trailed off, "girls." Light chuckling filled the room, but his point was well taken.

While adaptation is an integral part of the daily routine for teachers on this team, an equally important element is a keen attentiveness to where the students are academically, developmentally, and socially. Ms. Panagakis and Ms. Sánchez had intended to put their classes back into mixed-gender groups by the fourth quarter, but this plan met with strong resistance from both boys and girls. Many, in fact, asked to stay in the single-gender groups in eighth grade. "A lot of times, we'll let them tell us what's working and what isn't," says Ms. Panagakis. "The important thing is that we're in tune with their needs, and we will make the necessary adaptations to help them succeed."

Social Equity - NEXT

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