Learning is a risky business
Dr Bill Lucas, an expert on lifelong learning, argues that it is smart to make mistakes and that there are practical things we can do to support young people to be better risk-takers.
Life is full of risk. The world is changing faster than ever before. It follows that schools should help young people to understand how to judge risk for themselves.
In today's educational world, over-complicated and molly-coddling risk-assessment is the new orthodoxy with the worry of litigation never far away. And, even though schools do actually have more freedom to innovate than they sometimes dare to admit, the prevailing culture is risk-adverse.
We seem to be narrowing the frontiers of our thinking and forcing learners to regurgitate exactly what we tell them with little scope for creative responses. In short, we are spoon-feeding a whole generation of children when spoon-feeding, as EM Forster once told us, "teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon".
Why it's smart to learn from your mistakes
I would argue that without risk there can be no real learning. For our growth depends on being able to step out of our comfort-zone into the unknown, and, with support, to experiment and take risks. When we do this, we are bound to make mistakes.
Here are three ways, for example, that anyone who works with young people can encourage them to learn from taking risks:
- Congratulate and reward young people who are prepared to admit and share their mistakes in front of their peers.
- Get every adult routinely to admit their mistakes and show what they have learned.
- For most of the school year only display "work in progress", annotated to show the thought processes involved.
It's important to make sure that every pupil is taught how to give and receive criticism so that nobody has to fret that they have to be right all the time. We need to help young people become both more resourceful and more resilient.
To paraphrase Jean Piaget, this involves helping young people to know what to do when they do not know what to do.
We can give them tools ("Think of five things you did last time you got stuck"), lots of practice in working on challenging assignments with ambiguous and possibly contradictory answers and a whole range of problem-solving strategies to equip them for the unknown.
Overcoming obstacles
The main reason we do not take risks is the fear of failure and the emotional impact that can have. This could involve losing face, being hurt or upsetting the peer group. We can help students to be able to tell a good risk from a bad one.
Taking harmful drugs or being deliberately obnoxious is a bad risk. Regularly being prepared to give new things a go and committing to at least one demanding non-school activity at any one time of your life are brave and necessary risks to take. The more difficult or dangerous the task, the more we need to help young people practise it safely.
Standing out from the crowd
There is a tension at the heart of society today. On the one hand, with the advent of blogging and social networking, it is more possible than ever to create "the brand called me".
Yet paradoxically, the power of global brands, whether in clothing, music or sport, means that being genuinely different is something that most young people avoid. We need to teach (remind?) young people how to stick up for themselves more and dare to be different. Maybe we need a "Bring a virtual risk-taking role model to school" every month.
Ready, Go, Steady
Risk-taking involves three components on an ongoing basis:
Ready: a combination of analytical and ‘gut' appraisal of any possible course of action;
Go: an active commitment to ‘give it a go' using all available approaches; and
Steady: the all-important stage when you learn the lessons from whatever endeavour you have been engaged in so that you can excel next time round.
This is not just for schools. As parents we need to support our children, encouraging them to dream on and have new ideas and resisting the temptation to pour scorn on ideas in progress.
We need to keep listening to our children, especially as they go through the teenage years, watching out for the tell-tell signs that their minds are closing down to innovation and only open to activity in their peer group.
Above all, we need to be positive; constantly nurturing, cajoling, questioning and challenging our family to take risks and actively seek to grow and develop.
Bill Lucas
Dr Bill Lucas was the first CEO of the Campaign for Learning where he created the national awareness raising events Learning at Work Day and Family Learning Weekend. He is the author and co-author of more than 50 books including Power Up Your Mind, Discover Your Hidden Talents and Schools in the Learning Age.
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Comments on this article
Added: 17/03/2008 3:40pm
Nigel Fenner
I agree with much of what Bill Lucas is saying; however, I believe you can't take risks unless you are aware of the boundaries within which the risks can be 'contained'.