CSBGL is a call to schools and others to embark on a search. A search for a better understanding, better school curricula, better family practices, better community policies - to offer boys and girls a better world.
Welcome
You’ve found the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives. Since 2001, we’ve conducted research, encouraged public discussion, and been an advocate for boys and girls. Please come inside to learn more about our work, become acquainted with our staff and member schools, discover our services, explore our published research and other resources, and consider whether you might want to join with us to advance boys’ and girls’ lives.
Mission
The Center represents a commitment by a consortium of schools, in partnership with scholars from The University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and other universities, to conduct research, encourage public discussion, and advocate on behalf of boys and girls. Member schools commit themselves to developing an evidence basis for their curricula, especially in relation to the development of students’ identities as men and women, and support action research projects by faculty teams to address key curricular questions. Using research approaches that give voice to their lived experience, the Center strives to capture the dynamism and agency in students’ development and to help schools promote the widest sense of possibility and greatest hope for integrity in their lives. Its work is explicitly collaborative, engaging boys and girls, their parents, teachers and administrators, as well as university faculty, in a common pursuit of understanding and improvement. Teams from the various schools come together annually to discuss findings, share triumphs and to raise further questions.
Center News
Summer 2012
Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys : Strategies That Work
Michael Reichert (CSBGL Executive Director) and Richard Hawley published a new book in 2010. Challenging the widely held cultural impression that boys are stubbornly resistant to schooling, Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys features more than 100 detailed examples of classroom activities-along with real-world teaching techniques-that have proven effective with male students. Based on a wide-ranging, worldwide study of more than 1,500 boys and 1,000 teachers, Reichert and Hawley reveal what boys need in order to want to succeed in school and offer tips for forging successful relationships with boys. Woven throughout the book is moving testimony from both boys and teachers that validates the effectiveness of these lessons.
The 2012 CSBGL Coordinators' Retreat will be held at the University of Pennsylvania on September 9-10, 2012.
Learn more about CSBGL
The Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives was founded as a research collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and what has now become 9 independent schools. Historically, the Center was created to help schools address concerns related to boys: amidst a politically-charged discourse about boys’ and girls’ relative school performance, schools acknowledged problems—moral, behavioral, academic—with boys and wished to develop evidence-based improvements in their educational practice. In the course of this work, it became evident that to consider boys was always also to consider girls, not to mention the school overall.
