Developing our Academic Qualities: Risk-Taking
24 January 2025 - Academic
The class falls silent as the teacher’s gaze turns to you, repeating the question you didn’t hear the first time. All eyes turn, waiting to see if you get it right. Your throat feels dry as you stutter an answer…
Perhaps that scenario triggered a little anxiety or memory from your own school days? If so, it may help to remind us how difficult learning can be and how any attempt to answer a question, particularly for teenagers, who are acutely sensitive to the reactions of their peers, can feel like a huge risk. Learning always operates on the border between the known and the unknown, and that is what makes it both scary and exciting!
At Wycombe Abbey, we encourage our girls to be intelligent risk-takers. Carol Dweck’s research famously showed us that pupils who focus on the process of learning do much better than those who are preoccupied with the outcomes. Our pupils know that, in the long run, putting your hand up and having a go is far more important than getting it right the first time and that an imperfect paragraph is infinitely better than a pristine, empty page. Growth always happens by pushing ourselves up to and beyond our current abilities, whether that’s in the classroom or on the lacrosse pitch, even if, especially if, it doesn’t go as we hoped. We learn from our failures, not our successes.
As teachers, we foster intelligent risk-taking by creating a warm classroom environment where everyone’s voice is listened to, and where pupils have time to consider their responses. We don’t settle for ‘don’t knows’, but create prompts and questions which elicit rather than inhibit our pupils to ‘have a go’. When we or they make mistakes, we celebrate them! What can they teach us? How can they help us go deeper in our teaching and learning?
Mr Tom Startup
Consultant Teacher
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