This has been an amazing year at the Gurian Institute and YOU are the reason why.  Each of you has in some way used or heard about our services in your part of the world, and we deeply appreciate you.  Please feel free, always, to reach out to us on www.gurianinstitute.com.  Let us know how we can serve you better.

Next year, we will launch new books and podcasts, new speeches and trainings, a new Minds of Boys and Girls Online Course for Parents, more Helping Boys Thrive Summits, and more professional development, keynotes, workshops, and consulting.  We will also host our annual Summer Institute in Carlsbad, California, in June.  If you go to our Events schedule on www.gurianinstitute.com, you’ll see what’s already brewing for 2019.  We hope you’ll add our GI team to your schedule by inviting Michael Gurian or our trainers to your schools and communities.

A major new initiative in 2019 will be our “Trainer in Every School Program.”  In January, we’ll let you know much more about that. Our ultimate goal is to equip every school in the U.S. (and elsewhere, as requested) with a certified trainer.  As you may know from your own experience (and can confirm on our website’s Success page), when schools, communities, and parents receive science-based, research-driven, and strategies-focused training in how boys and girls learn and grow, student engagement and teacher effectiveness improve, test scores and grades rise, parent involvement and confidence improve, and discipline referrals, bullying and child distress decline. 

Why does this happen?  Because schools, communities, and families become safer, happier places.  As the whole child is understood in all its diversity through the three primary lens of human development–nature, nurture, and culture–school, family, and community systems adjust to nurture the nature of the whole child.  This is a powerful way to buck distracting social trends and stay with what is fundamental and crucial to child success. 

Nothing is more crucial than who we are as females and males–this ontology (way of being) sits at the heart of human development and education.  Even though we have seen recent pockets of social discussion about “the end of male and female” and “‘boy’ and ‘girl’ is just stereotyping,” our children and students are, indeed, female and male.  There is, of course, a spectrum of those two ontological elements of being, but we are female and male.

Why?  Because of the X and Y chromosomes.  Across cultures and races, wherever we are in a socioeconomic range, those chromosomes compel our brains to be “female” and “male.”  And while our brains reflect their chromosomal sex with a lot of range–and they have the freedom to blend masculine and feminine gender roles and ideas in our new millennium–they are still female and male, and always will be. 

Michael Gurian has noted in both Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls: “Even transgender brains prove female and male brains–someone who is transgender knows at a fundamental level that his or her brain is set in the male or female configuration, and wants to adjust the body toward that sexual configuration in the brain.”  “Female and male” are not done–in fact, it is when we don’t account for these elements of being that we create systems in which millions of boys and girls fail, fall behind, and even, in some cases, turn against us.

Most of us as professionals and parents came through our own high school, college, and post-secondary training without seeing the brain scans Michael and GI show in our work; thus, most of us didn’t realize how important “boy” and “girl” are to improving literacy, STEM, and other academic performance; battling against negative school culture, school-to-prison pipelines, ever-increasing child mental health issues; and helping all children to succeed in immensely diverse environments.  We didn’t know what we didn’t know.  The political landscape of most academic environments and campuses today still prohibit teacher and community education in “boys” and “girls,” especially “boys and men.”

But for more than 30 years, Michael Gurian has been training educators and parents to get to the heart and soul of children’s needs through the sex/gender lens, and for more than 20 years, our Gurian Institute trainers have helped spread this successful program to thousands of schools.  Now we have the foundation and framework to equip every school with access to success with boys, girls, and the whole child.   We thank all of you who have helped us help your communities.  You inspire us to keep working!

 Indeed, you are the reason we are here.  Your needs, concerns, and successes are our purpose.  Let’s interact and grow together in 2019!

From our Gurian family to you and yours, we wish you a great 2018 holiday season, a Merry Christmas, and a very happy new year.