2.12 Group session – discussing the experience of teaching gender equality and exploring unconscious bias

This section of the course provides an opportunity to reflect, share experience and discuss the ideas that you have encountered so far. How you do this will depend on the number of people in your study group and the time you have available. As experienced educators you will bring your own ideas and experience to bear on how you organise the discussion.

We suggest that you choose one person to facilitate and another to take notes and share action points at the end of the session. You should allow about an hour for the session.

After teaching and discussing the gender equality activities and going through the unconscious bias content, each participant in the study group will have recorded questions and observations in their learning log. If your group is fairly small you may wish to go round the group in turn – each tabling a question and taking time to share perspectives and understanding. In a larger group it’s probably better to pool questions on a flip chart and group together similar issues before starting the discussion. In this case, breaking into subgroups initially would be a good way to ensure that everyone’s views are heard. You might want to split groups by gender in order to explore differences of experience or you might want mixed groups so that groups can share experiences and build understanding.

Suggested questions for discussion:

• What were different teachers’ experiences of introducing and discussing gender stereotypes with pupils?
• Were the concepts, techniques and resources helpful? Did they work as you expected?
• What changes would you like to see in your school in relation to challenging gender stereotypes in the classroom and in school? What actions would lead to those changes being implemented?
• Were there any common themes from what you wrote in your learning logs in relation to unconscious bias?
• Did the results of the implicit bias test on gender and science surprise you?
• What ideas did you find most helpful? Were some more challenging than others?
• How do you think pupils will respond to the ideas and activities?
• What changes would you like to see in your school in relation to unconscious bias? What actions would lead to those changes being implemented?