The Rosengård model will make boys succeed in school

A small parade of 11-year-olds comes trudging in from the schoolyard to have a lesson in the classroom.

It is something that meets us when we step in through the doors to Rosengårdsskolan in Malmö. At the front of the train is a teacher and also at the end there is an adult who keeps a watchful eye on the children.

They look happy and some of them greet us and Cecilia Larsson-Ståhl who is the principal at the school.

Just a few weeks earlier, the night before Easter Monday, a building at the school was set on fire. Some broke in and set it on fire, but the police do not yet know who they were or why. Several cars on the street outside were also destroyed in arson.

It happened after several days of violent riots in various Swedish cities after the right-wing extremist Rasmus Paludan burned a Koran in Jönköping.

The fire at Rosengårdsskolan was a reminder of how important the school’s work to raise the boys’ grade results is, according to principal Cecilia Larsson-Ståhl. Rosengårdsskolan is located in Herrgården, which is an area that the police classify as particularly vulnerable.

Here, only 54 percent of all those who leave primary school are eligible for the upper secondary school’s vocational program, which can be compared with 86 percent in the whole country, according to figures from Delmos, which is the government’s authority against segregation.

This means that almost every second 15-year-old does not have the opportunity to start high school.

– Every student who succeeds in school is a benefit for society, and every school failure risks leading to mistakes, to crime, unemployment and mental illness, says Cecilia Larsson-Ståhl and takes us into a lesson in Swedish as a second language to show how teacher Sofie Nilsson works.

Today’s task is to write an argumentative text. Ahmed, 11, writes under the heading: “Less summer vacation”.

– I want less summer vacation because there are many students who come from other countries here, and they need more school, he says.

Next to him sits Amir, who is also eleven years old and who argues that the summer holidays should be longer. He thinks it is important to be able to travel abroad with his family.

– Then you can also start to miss school and long to return here, he says.

When they get stuck, they go to the step-by-step template that the teacher has handed out and which contains introductory sentences for each step in the writing process, for example: “In the newspaper yesterday I read that…”

– You can use the words here if you need help, says Ahmed and keeps up where all the steps are neatly arranged in columns.

While boys generally take up more space and dominate the classroom, research in recent years has highlighted them as the losers in school. In primary and secondary school, they achieve only 90 percent of the girls’ grade results, and their merit value is 24 points lower. There are differences that are systematic and that have nothing to do with coincidences or coincidence.

One explanation is that certain functions in the boys’ brains mature later. Research also shows that boys are generally more likely to give up and withdraw when they fail in school, while girls are more likely to fight on.

About a year ago Cecilia Larsson-Ståhl sat down and looked back at the results over the years to see if she could discover any pattern.

Suddenly she saw that the results during some years were reversed, that the boys in year 6 had higher results than the girls. When she looked for the common denominator, she discovered that it was an individual teacher, Sofie Nilsson, who had worked at Rosengårdsskolan for twenty years.

Together, they sat down and split up a number of success factors, based on Sofie’s twenty years of experience as a teacher, and brought them together with the research that exists in the field. This resulted in what they today call the Rosengård model.

What is the model about?

– Participation, says Sofie Nilsson. But also clarity and structure, Cecilia adds.

Participation is, for example, about letting students have their own development talks. The teacher is of course involved. But it is the children who prepare and present to their parents where they are and what is the next step in their school development.

– Especially boys need to know that: ‘I can do this – and this is the next step I need to take to reach my goal’. Then we can see directly how they become more motivated, says Cecilia.

She adds that is a method that suits everyone, even the girls. Rosengårdsskolan has had year classes where the boys sat quietly and calmly while the girls were active and got into conflicts.

– But seen as a whole, it is the boys who underperform, so therefore you sometimes need to generalize to move on and solve that problem. In addition, it will be a peace of mind, which benefits everyone in the class, says Cecilia.

The children are also involved in the lesson planning, says Sofie Nilsson. They are involved in talking about which assessment methods the teacher should use, what support they need to get, and where they should sit in the classroom to perform in the best way.

Ahmed and Amir almost always sit next to each other so that everyone can see that it works so well. Others come to the table in the middle because they need to sit with the teacher or another adult. Some sit alone because they work best then.

At the back there are some standing tables for those who get ants in their legs.

Another rule is zero tolerance for “fun quarrels” because it reinforces a boyish style that has proven to be destructive to school work.

The children understand very well all this and when they get involved in the decisions, they think it’s a good idea. It’s just a matter of drawing them into the discussion so that they are on the train, Sofie and Cecilia say.

In addition to participation, clarity and structure are important. For example, by always trying to have a checklist, of the kind that Ahmed kept, for the tasks to be done in the lessons.

– If it is good enough, no one should have to fail with the task, says Sofie Nilsson.

After the Easter riots have the political parties have proposed various measures that are most important to implement. Ebba Busch (KD) has wondered why the police did not fire sharply. Ulf Kristersson (M) has said that the police must get better weapons and mentioned water cannons as an example.

Jimmie Åkesson (SD) has talked about withdrawing residence permits for relatives if someone in the family has committed sufficiently serious crimes.

Party leader Johan Pehrson has told DN that he wants to see both “lovika gloves and iron gloves”.

Cecilia Larsson-Ståhl has often asked from a political point of view what should be done and always answered: “Think decisions on research, otherwise they risk becoming counterproductive”.

– There are lots of studies on what can help boys succeed in school. But unfortunately, politicians almost always only talk about what “consequences” different behaviors must have.

If you do not encounter the difficulties that the student has with the school work at the same time as the punishments, the “consequences” will be ineffective, she says.

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