Recently, I’ve spoken with a number of teachers about boys roughly in the Year 6 to 9 bracket and their behaviour towards their female teachers. There’s clearly an observable national shift amongst these boys toward more disrespectful, misogynistic and aggressive behaviour that we should all be concerned about.
No female teacher deserves to be subjected to this in her workplace. None. And that’s why I genuinely understand it when we snap to a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to this behaviour.
The problem with this approach is that the absence of a zero tolerance approach to this problem is not how we landed here.
The key to young men making different behavioural choices is an approach that leads to improved self-regulation. We need to proactively install empathy and compassion, while at the same time ensuring they take personal responsibility when they screw up.
Zero tolerance might well prevent these behaviours while the perpetrator is suspended and the subject is thereby removed from their influence, which is fine. But it won’t change the likelihood of reoffending when they next interact.
We need a more proactive approach. We need school leaders and teachers to agree that, when they notice such behaviour trends on the rise, taking the time to talk to students helps enormously.
Park the performance and curriculum pressure and allow male teachers to just chew the fat with their male students. Allow their influence in-person to usurp the online influence of dirtbags like Andrew Tate who prey on the space left when these boys are absent of positive male role models.
And allow female teachers to just talk to these boys too – in classrooms, in the yard, anywhere. The time spent in this relational capital serves as the best insurance against harmful behaviours in the future.
The conversations need to be low stakes and informal. It’s just getting to know each other. That’s all.
The responsive work is where restorative approaches kick in. When these boys cause their female teachers harm, the habit of the school needs to be that they personally repair that harm as a condition of re-entry into that classroom.
Our job is to support them to do the awkward and uncomfortable work that installs the requisite empathy and compassion for future self-regulation.
I love the idea of teachers having more influence on our young men’s development than Andrew Tate. We need to lean into the opportunity to make that creep, and any others like him, as redundant in their lives as we possibly can.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. I love sharing success stories from our incredible partner schools – check out this video from the team at Banksia Grove Primary School in WA about the impact of a Real Schools partnership on their teachers, students and the entire school community.
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