Monthly Ed Tip November 2021: How Do You Create a Safe Learning Environment?

This environment is characterized by experts when students are cooperating and eager to participate in all activities, willing to learn from each other, respect the rights of others, feeling physically safe, able to take risks learning and not sensing humiliated when they make a mistake, and realizing that mistakes are part of the learning process?

The importance of building a safe learning environment for learners is something that cannot be overstated. While it's true that every student learns a bit differently from the next, the environment itself plays a significant role in their development. Safe learning environments translate into comfortable learning environments. They are places where learners feel at home.

This scenario poses some questions.  What are the mindsets of educators who help create motivating and learning environments?  What are the characteristics of these adults who create these environments?  Can you reach an unreachable kid?

Additionally, what is the mindset of students who are motivated and learn effectively?  What is the mindset of the student who is willing to learn from you?  What is your mindset and the mindset you want to create?

Robert Brooks, a leading national and international speaker and author on the themes of resilience, motivation, school climate, a positive work environment, and family relationships, stresses the importance of mindsets.  He explains that mindsets are assumptions and expectations we have for ourselves and others that guide our behavior, teaching practices and our interactions with students, parents, and colleagues.  Even though we are unaware of our mindsets, they guide our behavior.  Educators must remember that our brains feel before we think.

Dr. Brooks, a member of the faculty of Harvard Medical School, a clinical psychologist and the author or co-author of 19 books on these topics, emphasizes the importance of creating a “motivating environment” in which all members of the school community feel welcome and safe.  He lectures that when these feelings exist, “they provide a climate for effective teaching and learning that goes beyond academics and embraces the reinforcement of such attributes as empathy, caring, and altruism. He goes on to maintain that “the presence of positive emotions in the school setting impacts motivation, learning, self-discipline, and resilience.”

Teachers always ask Brooks for teaching strategies and he responds that it is not strategies but relationships that solves problems and that strategies are worthless unless it is in the context of a good student-teacher relationship.  Brooks cites a wonderful physiologist, Dr. Julius Siegel, who has researched the most important things people believed help them to be resilient through adversity and to cope more effectively.  Siegel writes that “All survivors have one thing in common; they all have experienced a charismatic person in their lives, a person from whom they gather strength.”  A charismatic adult who truly believed in them and stood by them and from whom they gather strength.

Students don’t care what we know until they know that we care.

Research reflects the implication of the often-used expression, “Your students may not remember what you taught them, but they will not forget how you made them feel.”  For instance, you probably do not remember how to solve a algebraic quadratic equation, but you do recall whether you felt the teacher did or did not like you or at the least, the teacher’s mannerisms.

Every child that a teacher works with knows how the teacher feels about them.  Teachers can’t hide that feeling and it’s going to play a major role because the teacher’s expectations and assumptions guide what they do.  If a child is seen as lazy or unmotivated, the child will be treated differently than if seen as struggling.

All children from birth want to succeed.

Robert White, a Harvard University psychologist in the 1950s, writes that “Too often in a psychoanalytical model, we say there are two main motivators, sex and aggression.  I agree they are important.  But I believe we are missing one of the major motivators in life called the Drive for Effectiveness, the motivation to be effective and successful.  It is there at birth. In every child from birth there is a wish to succeed and master their environment.”

Commenting on Dr. White’s writing, Brooks believes that if a teacher starts with the assumption that a student does not want to succeed, it is going to negatively impact the student and “the student will die emotionally and spiritually in that classroom.”

Lightheartedly, he remarks “I never met a three or four-year-old year child who said, I hope when I go to school I do poorly and fail.  Everyone wants to succeed and receive respect from other people.”

Continuing, he advances the statement that “This student is lazy, is unmotivated, and doesn’t care” should be banned from schools because the words lazy and unmotivated denote a negative mindset.  He believes the use of these words indicates a teacher has written off the student.  “You should never say a child is unmotivated.  When we say kids are unmotivated, it is ridiculous.  You know what that would mean?  They’re dead.  All students are motivated.  When we say that students are unmotivated, what we are really saying is that they are not doing what we want them to do,” Brooks frequently states in his presentations.

For instance, when a child takes his first two steps and falls, no one says, “If they only tried harder to walk, they won’t fall.”  This is the same as saying a child is lazy or unmotivated.

How do we create a motivating environment where the students want to work with us and not against us?  Below are four mindsets that Dr. Brooks recommends that creates students are cooperating and eager to participate in all activities, willing to learn from each other, respect the rights of others, feeling physically safe, able to take risks learning and not sensing humiliated when they make a mistake, and realizing that mistakes are part of the learning process?

Mindset 1. The Elephant in the Classroom is the Humiliation Associated with the Fear of Making a Mistake (Brooks, 2000).

Have you ever heard of The Adolescent’s Prayer “Dear God, please do not let me be embarrassed or humiliated today in front of my peers.”

Educators must realize that one of the greatest obstacles to learning and motivation for some students is the fear of making mistakes in front of their peers resulting in feelings of humiliation and embarrassment.

Many students equate making mistakes with feeling humiliated and consequently will avoid learning tasks that appear very challenging.  Many times these students are bullies, quit at tasks, or say the work is dumb rather than engage in a learning activity that they believe may result in failure and embarrassment.  This fear of humiliation from making a mistake is a huge problem for many students, particularly for adolescent males, who to protect their self-esteem, believe it is better to be disruptive rather than appear stupid in front of their peers.  One of the most powerful approaches for reinforcing a feeling of competence in students is to lessen their fear of failure.

One of our greatest motivations is avoidance motivation.

Children will sometimes go to great lengths and resort to many behaviors to avoid the feeling of humiliation.  At times, this fear will lead to avoidance motivation, that is avoidance of aversive experiences.  Some children subconsciously use “avoidance motivation” as a way to protect themselves from situations that they judge will lead to failure and humiliation.

Avoidance motivation is quite common, even in adults.  For example, have you ever screened phone calls with caller ID because you didn’t want to talk to someone or walked purposefully in a different direction because you didn’t want to interact with a person.  Think back to your college days and what would happen and how would you feel/react if your college professor said s/he was going to start calling on you?

If teachers feel that students are using avoidance motivation, the question they should ask themselves is how do they lessen the avoidance motivation behavior instead of punishing students for the behavior.  And they can begin by asking themselves “What are students avoiding and why?”

What can educators do to minimize the fear of making mistakes and for students to begin to realize that mistakes are expected and accepted?  Namely, by emphasizing to children that making a mistake is part of the learning process.

The best way to overcome the fear of failure is to openly address it with students.  One technique is for teachers to ask their class at the beginning of the school year, “Who feels they are going to make a mistake and not understand something in class this year?”  Before any students can respond, the teacher raises their hand and talks about past mistakes they have made in certain situations.  It is often helpful for teachers to share some of their own anxieties and experiences about making mistakes when they were students.  Discuss with students their own stories of failure.  “What can I do as your teacher to avoid you being afraid to make a mistake?”  Then openly discuss how you handled these fears.

When you remove the fear of humiliation from making a mistake by actively and openly addressing the issue, students will take the appropriate and realistic risks to learn.  This is part of feeling competent.

Mindset 2. Believe that all students want to be successful and if a student is not learning, educators must ask why the student is struggling and how they can adjust their teaching style and instructional material to meet the student needs.

Naturally, when students feel they cannot succeed, they are not going to be motivated to do so.  This feeling is like a rock around their neck that weighs them down.  Many children view mistakes as things they cannot control because they are unintelligent.

When students hold this belief, they lose faith in their ability to learn and a feeling of hopelessness pervades their psyche.  They become vulnerable to engaging in counterproductive or self-defeating ways of coping.  Teachers who observe these behaviors may easily reach the conclusion that the student is unmotivated or lazy, or not caring about school.  As negative assumptions and mistakes dominate, teachers are less likely to consider more productive strategies for reaching the student.

At times, their thoughts turn towards negative actions; e.g., what punishments would finally get through to the student.  However, if educators subscribe to the theory that each student wishes to succeed, negative assumptions are less likely to prevail. 

At times, it is helpful to remember that when students entered first grade on the first day of school they had visions of success in their minds and failure was not an option.  Somewhere along their educational paths, they have lost their way and it is the job of all educators to determine where the detour occurred and redirect them onto the road to a successful education.

Educators should be mindful that it is difficult for students to invest energy in learning when they are burdened by a negative mindset, believing regardless of how much time and effort they expend, they will still fail. In essence, they have developed what psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman termed “learned helplessness”  Students with this mindset hear exhortations to “try harder” as accusatory and judgmental remarks, hardening them from accepting any assistance we may offer and they entertain little, if any, hope for future success.

I would contend that if teachers are to succeed with these students, they must first consider techniques for changing this self-defeating negative mindset.

A beginning helpful step would be to recall the writing of Steven Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  Addressing negative mindset, Covey asks “What is the most important aspect of a resilient person who copes effectively?  They never blame the situation, other people, or themselves.  They ask what is it that they can do differently that can change the situation.”

According to Covey, an important approach that resilient people have when things are not going well in their lives is to ask, “What can I do differently, rather than wait for someone else to change first?”

Brooks writes that resilient students (Brooks, 2015,) believe they will learn from their mistakes.  He argues (Brooks, 2000) that competent people know they are going to fail and that students have to learn that when they make mistakes in the classroom they will not be judged harshly, accused, or suspected of being stupid.

The struggling learner must believe that their efforts will result in successful learning.  Whereas the successful learner already believes if they put in effort they can improve/learn, the child who is not successful starts to believe why should they put in the effort if it is not going to end up anywhere.  For them, many times it is not an issue of effort but an issue in believing that their efforts will lead to success and not failure.

Often children who struggle in school believe that when they succeed, they attribute it to things outside their control such as luck, chance, or fate.  For example, normal comments are “The teacher made the test easy or ‘I was lucky.’”  The problem with this belief is that when a rough spot is encountered, they don’t believe they can succeed because they falsely attribute it to luck, chance, or fate and not because of their abilities.

Daniel Lieberman and Michael Long address this issue in their excellent book The Molecule of More.  In the book they discuss “a feeling of what psychologists call an internal locus of control.”  When in this phase, a person tends to “view one’s choices and experiences as being under one’s own control as opposed to being determined by fate, luck, or other people.”  They describe it as a good feeling.  They continue that “In addition to making people feel good, an internal locus of control also makes people more effective.  People with a strong sense of internal locus of control are more likely to achieve academic success and get high-paying jobs.”

By contrast, Lieberman and Long explain that “those who have an external locus of control take a more passive view of life.  Some are happy, relaxed, and easygoing, but at the same time they often blame others for their failures and may not put forth their best efforts on a consistent basis.”

Mindset 3. Believe that attending to the social-emotional needs of students is not an “extra-curriculum” that draws time away from teaching academic subjects (Brooks, 2015).

In his exceptional New York Times bestselling book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, Richard Davidson concurs, writing that “the circuitry of the emotional brain overlaps with that of the rational, thinking brain. In fact, emotion works with cognition in an integrated and seamless way to enable us to navigate the world of relationships, work, and spiritual growth.”

As an example, he observes that when “positive emotions energize us, we are better able to concentrate, to figure out the social networks at a new job or new school, to broaden our thinking so we can creatively integrate diverse information, and to sustain our interest in a task so we can persevere.”

Davidson concludes that “emotion is neither interrupting nor disrupting, … it is facilitating.  A feeling permeates virtually everything we do.  No wonder, then, that circuits in the brain that control and regulate emotion overlap those involved in functions we think of as other mental processes; they blur into each other.  As a result, virtually all brain regions play a role in or are affected by emotion, even down to the visual and auditory cortices.”

This dichotomy has been fueled, in part, by the emergence of high stakes testing and an emphasis on accountability.  In this age of high stakes testing in which many teachers are overwhelmed by the amount of academic material they must cover, an unfortunate belief has emerged, namely, that expending time and energy on addressing the social-emotional needs of students is an “extra curriculum” and will divert precious time from teaching academic content.  When this issue is discussed with teachers, it is common to hear  “We barely have time to get through the assigned curriculum. We really don’t have time to focus on anything else.”

One technique that teachers can use to relate effectively to students and help attend to their needs, particularly their social-emotional ones, is to be empathic and attempt to perceive the world through the eyes of the student.  Empathic educators are able to place themselves in the shoes of their students and others and perceive the world through their eyes (Brooks, 2016).

Educators would to do well to remember the words of Lev Vygotsky, when he posits that "Children grow into the intellectual environment that they are in."  Vygotsky’s work has become the foundation of the theory of cognitive development that stresses the fundamental role of social interaction in the development of cognition.

A student’s sense of belonging, security, and self-confidence in the classroom provides the scaffolding that supports the foundation for enhancing learning, motivation, self-discipline, responsibility, and the ability to deal more effectively with obstacles and mistakes (Brooks, 1991, 224).

It has often been said that our brain feels before we think.  In fact, this belief was recognized in in 1892 by G. Samuel Hall in his first book published for teachers in the United States, “If you succeed in gaining their love, your influence will be greater in some respects than that of parents themselves.”

Furthermore, educators need to reflect upon the true sense of the words “educate” and “discipline” when pondering how to develop a more empathic classroom.

The root of the word education is “duct” as in aqueduct, meaning to “lead from,” the prefix means “out from.” Therefore, educatemeans “to guide students out from things inside they already know and have.”

The origin of discipline is from Anglo-French & Latin, from Latin disciplina teaching, learning, from discipulus pupil.  Hence, discipline means “instruction given to a learner.”

Consequently, a disciplinarian in the true sense of the word should perceive discipline as a teaching process rather than as a process of intimidation and humiliation.

Mindset 4. Believe in a strength-based model (Brooks, 2012), which includes identifying and reinforcing each student’s “island of competence.”

This belief is at the core of a strength-based approach to education and overlaps all of the other points.  Some students believe that school is a place where their deficits rather than their strengths are highlighted.  Effective educators must move beyond a philosophy that fixates on a student’s problems and vulnerabilities and affords equal, if not grater space, to strengths and competencies.  Researchers and clinicians have emphasized the significance of emphasizing areas of strengths or “island of competence” in building self-confidence, motivation, and resilience (Deci & Flaste, 1995; Katz, 1994; Rutter, 1985).

Rutter (1985), in describing resilient individuals, observed, “Experiences of success in one area of life led to enhanced self-esteem and a feeling of self-efficacy, enabling them to cope more successfully with the subsequent life challenges and adaptations” (p.604).  Katz (1994) noted, “Being able to showcase our talents, and to have them valued by important people in our lives, helps us to define our identities around which we do best” (p10).

Following are some additional mindsets that will improve the emotional climate of the classroom

• Teach self-control rather than exert their own control.

• Set expectations rather than rules.

• Diffuse minor disruptions with humor rather than use sarcasm to turn disruptions into confrontations.

• Privately counsel chronic discipline problems rather than publicity humiliate chronic misbehaviors.

• Be judicious rather than judgmental.

• Choose words/actions carefully rather than wield power recklessly resorting to anger/intimidation.

• Help all students feel successful rather than punish students for being unsuccessful.

• Address misbehavior rather than attack the character of the misbehavers.

• See each student’s uniqueness rather than compare children to one another.

• Treat all students with respect rather than make it clear that not all students deserve respect.

• Highlight good behavior rather than make examples of poor behavior.

• Be proactive; create environments that minimize misbehavior rather than reactive which blame students for the lack of order in their classrooms.

• Love the student, reject their behavior.

• Educate rather than humiliate.

I hope the material presented in this article is obvious and validates what you are already doing.  Actually, if you are a successful teacher, you are probably already employing many of the above ideas/methods successfully and the only difference is you might not classify/categorize what you are doing in your classroom with what is presented above.

In closing, I often recall a sentiment used by a Harvard professor in his last class imploring his students to always remember that “brains are like hearts; they go where they are appreciated.”