Six Ways Education Leaders Can Encourage Risk-Taking in Schools
Think back to when you first stepped into a leadership role. What did you envision for the future of your school or district? What changes did you set out to influence?
In your wildest dreams, what kind of school did you create?
For many school leaders, the answer might look something like this: A place where every student feels that they belong, has what they need to succeed, and truly enjoys learning. A place where teachers are empowered to be creative and have the time and space to connect with students on an individual level. A place where every community member is challenged, engaged, and, ultimately, successful in their chosen path.
In your work, you’re likely chipping away at micro-changes across your district that get you a bit closer to this vision every day. Some days are likely better than others, and some feel like a big setback. This article offers a new lens through which to consider how you can influence change. An often-overlooked element of a thriving school is its receptiveness to risk-taking. That ideal school culture described above? It isn’t possible to create without giving students and teachers the permission and safety to take risks in their journeys as teachers and learners.
In other words, your school community won’t be successful unless you allow its members to take a risk, fail, fail again, and even celebrate that failure.
Here’s why and how you can create a culture of empowered risk-takers who embrace failure in the pursuit of success.
The Brain Science of Risk-Taking, Failure, and Learning
Let’s start with a quick look at how the brain responds to risk and failure. In this blog for teachers, Learning Scientist Anne Snyder describes the relationship between failure and neuroplasticity:
“If we examine learning at the neural level, we find clear evidence that failure is an essential part of the biological processes behind learning. Take the example of neuroplasticity — the overarching term for the remarkable ability of the brain to change through learning. Our brains are constantly creating new neural connections at a rate and a level of complexity that is staggering, but this doesn’t happen because we succeed at everything. In fact, what happens is a sort of complicated dance between success and failure, all in relation to the stimuli receive from around us as well as our emotions, our thoughts, and even the things we already know.
Sometimes those neural connections are strengthened through successful encounters, but an equally important part of the cognitive process involves what happens when things break down. Sometimes the things we learn are incorrect or not useful, or we simply need to change course…. In the case of failure, rather than strengthening connections and holding on to old information, the connections weaken through a process called axon terminal arbor pruning.
What would happen if our brains never built failure into the process, and instead just held on to all the information that leads to correct answers? Research suggests that this simply doesn’t work. In fact, experiments with mice have demonstrated that when synaptic pruning is prevented or altered, the mice end up with more synaptic connections in the brain, but at a severe cost: those connections are weaker, and their brains are unable to free up space for anything new. These mice then engage in odd repetitive movements, and demonstrate negative social behaviors and, strikingly, are unable to learn new information. By building failure into the process, the brain actually makes success more likely.”
Some learning scientists even argue that educators should systematically design experiences that ensure all students can experience — and learn from — failure. That’s where a culture of risk-taking comes in. Empower students and teachers to take risks, allow them to embrace and celebrate failure, and watch as they experience deep, conceptual learning and lasting growth.
As with any school change, it all starts at the top — with school leaders modeling and enabling risk-taking. Here are six ways you can begin to foster a culture of risk-taking and productive failure in your school:
#1: Model Risk-Taking as a Leader
Again, as with so many school transformations, change starts at the top. That means modeling risk-taking and embracing failures as a leader! Take the plunge on a creative initiative you’ve been considering but were afraid to embrace. Be transparent with your staff that you know the initiative presents some opportunities for failure, and when you inevitably run into obstacles or even find that you’ve outright failed in what you set out to do, be transparent about that with staff, too. If you expect teachers to model risk-taking and failure in the classroom (which is critical to influence student behavior and shift school culture), then prove to teachers that it’s safe for them to do so by modeling those behaviors yourself.
#2: Talk About Failure, Risks, and the Brain with Students and Teachers
None of this is a secret or a trick — so be transparent! Give staff some background on the connection between failure and neuroscience. Offer some engaging professional development on risk-taking and a growth mindset, if possible. Instruct teachers to have conversations with students about the science of failure, too. A growth mindset is an important topic to discuss with students — just telling students about growth mindsets, (perhaps by explaining that the brain is like a muscle, ready to be strengthened) can actually help students adopt a growth mindset. Principal Dr. Traniece Brown-Warrens says,
“Teaching students about productive struggle, what it looks or feels like, and teaching tools they can use when they face failure helped students to start to normalize failure as part of the learning process. Students then started to build the muscle of overcoming failure, so that they are now taking more risks and embracing failure as a way to show their thinking.” -Dr. Traniece Brown-Warrens
Get everyone on the same page and give them all the background knowledge you have to get them on board.
#3: Trust Your Teachers and Your Students to Experiment
We want teachers to model risk-taking for their students. So, encourage your staff to take risks in their practice. During staff meetings or through online conversations, have your teachers share their most experimental lessons, projects, and approaches. Reinforce shared knowledge about the science of failure to make it crystal clear that there is just as much value in sharing what didn’t work as what did. Some examples of risks teachers might take include interdisciplinary, passion-based, or project-based learning; launching new clubs, courses, or pilots; or adopting new technology.
The key here is trust. Creating a culture of risk-taking that celebrates failures requires a tremendous amount of trust between teachers and students, as well as between staff and leadership. To share failures requires vulnerability, and many members of your community may be uncomfortable with it until they see firsthand that their school community really is there to catch them when they fall.
Principal Gerald Paterson suggests,
“Implement “innovation cycles” or “teacher labs,” where educators are encouraged to try something new in their practice, document the process, and share their reflections with colleagues in a safe, supportive space.”
#4: Get Creative with Technology to Make Risk-Taking Inclusive
Technology can help you create an environment where taking risks is an accessible exercise to all students and teachers. In this blog, EdTech expert and educator Stacey Roshan describes how she uses online participation tools in varying modalities to give hesitant or shy students an opportunity to participate and engage. She says,
“Sometimes, disconnected students come to life online.”
When you’re asking teachers — or when your teachers are asking their students — to be vulnerable and embrace the possibility of failure, consider how you can use multimodal learning or online forums to scaffold steps to greater risks. Offer students and teachers lots of choices for expression and experimentation.
# 5: Redefine Success as a School
Perhaps the greatest challenge in creating a school culture that embraces risks and failure is to confront the deeply entrenched notions of success that undergird the long-standing infrastructure of your school. Students understand that their success is measured by grades and GPAs; teachers understand that their success is measured by student performance measures like grades, test scores, and even graduation rates. For many of the students and teachers in your community, the stakes feel impossibly high. Without a real investment in changing how success is defined, any conversations about celebrating failure will feel hollow and risks will continue to be avoided.
Of course, change at that scale is anything but simple. Start small by encouraging teachers to hold 1:1 progress discussions with students that include non-academic indicators of growth (grit, collaboration, self-direction) and a focus on progress. In your own conversations with staff, emphasize some of the same measures over class averages. When possible and within reason, implement policies that allow for flexibility in grading or retakes to reinforce a growth mindset.
#6: Adopt a Transformative Instructional Model
No matter the language you use in conversations with students and the priorities you review with your staff, challenges to aligning a risk-tolerant culture with one that leverages a traditional instructional grading model will remain.
However, if you are in a place where you can pursue lasting, structural change, consider adopting a transformative model like competency-based education or standards-based grading to flip notions of success and failure on their heads for good.
These models, which shift emphasis from performance to mastery, grouping and progressing students not by age but by need, inherently encourage risk-taking. They encourage students to experiment and explore by allowing the demonstration of learning in multiple ways. Standards-based and competency-based models are interconnected with personalized or individualized learning, where students and teachers partner closely to set goals, monitor progress, and work toward mastery of content and skills.
Of course, adopting a transformative instructional model for your school or district is one of the greatest risks you can take as a leader. Perhaps you can fulfill the first strategy on this list with the final one! What better way to model risk-taking than by placing trust in your students and teachers to take learning into their own hands?
What’s one small risk you could take this month to shift your school’s culture? Share with us in the comments.
