Who dares wins
Barbara Langford, Deputy Head – Academic, talks about intellectual risk-taking at Westbourne House School.
Very young children are not afraid to make mistakes, as they have no concept of failure. You only need to watch children learning to walk to realise that they are prepared to take risks and that perseverance is naturally engrained. Sadly, as children become more aware of what other people are doing and fear judgement from others, they become more intellectually risk adverse.
So, it is the responsibility of teachers to celebrate the learning process rather than purely the finished article. If you never push yourself, you will never fail or make mistakes - but you will also never progress.
Below are two of the High Performance Learning strands that we have been focussing on at Westbourne House School this term, with the encouragement to be ‘brave not perfect’.
But what does taking intellectual risks mean? Engaging in tasks (for example answering or asking questions in front of the rest of the class) that place the person at risk of making mistakes or appearing, in their eyes, less able than others.
We want our pupils at Westbourne to take these risks, ‘have a go’ and push themselves, in order to learn more. Intellectual risk-taking and metacognition are related: as students take more risks, over time, they become more aware of their knowledge and skills and more skilled at self-regulation (our Meta-Thinking HPL strand 
).
At school and at home we can help our children to do this. We can encourage their self-confidence to grow by showing that making errors is a natural part of learning and that errors provide the primary means of improving performance. This means creating an atmosphere in which children feel comfortable to explore, experiment and take risks in problem-solving and learning situations. The result is a process during which children are not focused purely on the outcome but on the learning opportunities they encounter along the way.
Many people we admire, JK Rowling for example, ‘failed’ countless times before they succeeded. Our creativity and innovation should never stop. Recognising that we benefit from a constant, cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes has a positive impact on learning.
Often there is not one right answer or a perfect solution; becoming comfortable with uncertainty and being able to express different ideas and perspectives is an essential life tool and a skill we hope that the children start to learn here at Westbourne. We can see that in subjects like history or RS there is not always a single correct answer but in science and maths there is also ambiguity and often many different paths that lead to a single answer.
The first step our teachers take to encourage risk-taking is by creating a safe environment and a strong relationship with each and every pupil. The second step is praising the risk-taking attempts and if a child falls short, creating a learning opportunity.
For example, when learning languages Spanish Teacher, Miss Barrow, says: “It’s so easy to make mistakes in languages and children don’t like to get it wrong. I always remind my pupils that I make mistakes in English from time to time so making a mistake in a new language is part of the learning experience.
“I encourage the children to be agile, take risks and to go for it! When someone makes a mistake that everyone can learn from, I thank them for being my assistant teacher and giving everyone the opportunity to learn. I also get them to do pair work so they can build their confidence and dare to take risks with a new language with just one other person.”
Mrs Bonn, Food Tech teacher, is keen to encourage pupils not to be afraid of making mistakes in cooking because she knows that this will ultimately make them more confident and better chefs.
Mrs Bonn says: “From an early age, my pupils are encouraged to begin to think and work independently to encourage them to work confidently and not always use the teacher as a first port of call.”
When pupils ask Mrs Bonn for reassurance, she will often bounce the question back and ask him or her “What do you think? What are your instincts telling you?” to empower pupils to take control of how they manage their own work. With this grows confidence and an awareness of their own abilities.
Mrs Bonn continued: “Pupils also learn from one and others’ mistakes, and I remind pupils that even Mrs Bonn makes the occasional mistake when distracted or in a rush, so none of us are infallible.
“We do of course get the occasional ‘happy mistake’, where a pupil takes an alternative approach by accident, but the outcome is both intriguing and, at times, highly creative. We celebrate and share all our mistakes in class, both happy and frustrating, allowing pupils to feel less fearful of things not always going to plan.
“To promote creativity, we always encourage pupils to stretch themselves by experimenting with different ingredients to enhance the flavour of their dishes and develop their palettes. Again, there are highs and lows at times when pupils add an extra pinch of this or that into their creations, but the important thing is that they feel empowered to have a play and enjoy the experience.”
Outside school, parents can model intellectual risk-taking by letting children know when they are doing something outside their comfort zone: “I’ve applied for a job. I’m not confident that I’ll get it, but if I don’t apply then I definitely won’t”. In direct contrast to promoting ‘errorless learning’, we should reward ‘having a go’, error correction and improvement as well as perseverance, and this applies across the curriculum.
Professor John Hattie, a highly respected researcher in education, is famous for saying: “A teacher’s job is not to make work easy. It is to make it difficult. If you are not challenged, you do not make mistakes. If you do not make mistakes, feedback is useless.”
A pupil’s job is to dare to have a go because ‘who dares wins’.
Read more about High Performance Learning at Westbourne House.