We are proud to welcome Master Trainer Rob Kodama to this year’s Summer Institute, which will be held at Army and Navy Academy, a Gurian Model School, in Carlsbad, CA, June 21-23.  To learn more about this professional development opportunity and to register, click:  https://gurianinstitute.com/events/gurian-summer-institute-2019/.

Rob will provide two workshop sessions on Strategies for Teaching Boys and Girls based on his work over the last fifteen years training educators, parents, and professionals in how boys and girls learn and grow.  He will also provide a workshop about his Becoming a Man program at Crespi Carmelite High School, where he is the Dean of Admissions.  Crespi is a boys’ school known for both academic excellence and character education.   Rob’s Boys and Girls Learn Differently workshops will be powerful for anyone teaching youth, and they are required attendance for anyone becoming a certified trainer.  Here’s more from Rob.

My two-part Boys and Girls Learn Differently – Strategies Sessions will give participants a tool box full of practical strategies that can be adapted for use in any classroom to increase teacher effectiveness and make sure the needs of both boys and girls are being met.

The workshops will model the strategies as if in a classroom setting.

These workshops include specific innovations for coeducational classrooms and for single sex classrooms and academies.

Some of the strategies we will work with include:

*Movement as a learning tool;

*Brain Breaks as essential learning aids;

*Literacy strategies, with particular emphasis on getting more reading and writing from our boys;

*STEAM strategies, with particular emphasis on girls and STEM;

*Visual-spatial prompts and tools;

*Social-emotional tools for both coed and single sex environments; and more.

Come ready to learn together, work together, brainstorm together, and focus on tools that have proven effective in classrooms across the country.

On Becoming a Man

My course at Crespi is designed to teach high school senior boys what it means to become a mature, responsible man.  It is a secular introduction for teen boys to the spiritual journey of the male life from birth to death.  The course could be more broadly titled Men’s Studies and its goal is to teach young men the responsibilities and joys of becoming the mature masculine in contrast to the failed models of men that contemporary culture has forged and foisted upon us.  As we do activities together, work together, build programs together, the course helps boys learn for themselves how to become happy, successful, responsible, contributors and leaders.

In my workshop at the Gurian Summer Training Institute, we will answer three questions:

*What is a mature man?

*How does a male teen learn to become a “man”?

*What are the benefits of becoming a man, and how do we motivate boys toward those benefits.

With answers to these questions, we will delve deeper into how we can teach boys to weight their own perceptions of

*what maleness is;

*developmental differences between males and females they need to know about in order to love and be loved;

*male culture, male socialization and the difficulties of manhood in contemporary culture;

*the transition from boy psychology to man psychology;

*initiation rituals in a modern world–for better and worse;

*male self-esteem and male nurturing from moms and fathers, husbands, and mentors;

*boys’ perceptions of girls and girls’ perceptions of boys;

*societal depictions of men and women; and

*responsibility and accountability in relationships.

We’ll be able to workshop some of these but not all in our hour together, but no matter how many our lively discussion involves, participants will leave the workshop with healthy archetypes, practical tools, and immediate takeaways to use with adolescent boys and emerging young men.

I hope you’ll join us at the Gurian Summer Training Institute at Army and Navy Academy in Carlsbad, CA on June 22-23, 2019.  To learn more and to register, click here:  https://gurianinstitute.com/events/gurian-summer-institute-2019/.  Thank you.