CCBE
Research Report 2019-2020 crescentschool.org/ccbe @CSBoysResearch
The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education
Discovering How Boys Learn Best
CCBE
CCBE
RESEARCH REPORTS The Crescent Centre for Boys’ Education
Discovering How Boys Learn Best
CHARACTER How might Grade 7 boys have better success in skill development if they self-identify a need for personal growth?
Greg Ryerson
“Building awareness of self-efficacy has proven to be a positive influence in the lives of the Middle School boys”, says Middle School teacher Greg Ryerson. His year-long research challenged his students to explore the development of their 4C skills - communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. Using surveys, reflection prompts from journal entries and interviews, he found that boys became more aware of their comfort zones and were able to leverage existing abilities through skill development. They better appreciated the power of collaboration and communication as they developed effective teamwork strategies; each boy was able to identify and contribute to solutions with his own strengths. One particular area that Mr. Ryerson found most intriguing was discovering
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that the boys want to develop new skills coming from a place of strength. This was contrary to his in-going assumption that the students would first identify areas of weakness and work to address those. His research indicated that we would be more successful by first identifying areas of strength and confidence, using those skills to “train up” any weaker areas. Mr. Ryerson is eager to explore this further and dig into how he can make a pedagogical shift to focus on this. He plans to delve further into his findings in the fall and is in a unique position to conduct a 2.0 version of his project with his mentor group next year. He will share his initial and subsequent learnings at the IBSC Conference in 2021. Link to Report (pending) Mr. Ryerson’s Action Research poster
