Who doesn’t love a good TED talk? By far my favourite at the moment is ‘Teach girls bravery, not perfection’ by the inspirational Reshma Saujani.
One of the reasons that this thought-provoking speech struck such a cord with me is that I’ve spent my 14-year teaching career working in single-sex education, at two all-girls schools. In this time, one of the things that has most concerned myself and numerous colleagues is the reluctance many girls have to take risks and their fear of making mistakes.
When I reflect on my own behaviour as a female, I feel that I’m someone who has always taken risks. I’ve lived abroad alone, fought in kick-boxing tournaments and married outside of my own culture. Yet when it came to applying for my first head of faculty job… I hesitated.
‘Doubting demons’
Why? I’d been a confident and competent second in faculty for five years and people I respected were telling me I was ready. The perfect job was advertised in Tes. But when I looked at the job spec, all I saw were the things I couldn’t do rather than the things I could. I was afraid - afraid of not being a perfect head of faculty.
In the end, I fought my doubting demons (didn’t need boxing gloves for that particular bout) and got the job. Although it was a challenging first year, I never once felt that I wasn’t ready.
Now, every time I feel myself getting frustrated with a pupil for not wanting to make a mistake, I remind myself of that time.
Research shows that in tests, women and girls tend to rate themselves more negatively than men do. American psychologists, Dunning and Ehrlinger carried out a piece of research on the differences in gender in terms of perception of ability as compared to actual ability. In a science test, on a scale of 1 to 10, the females thought they’d got an average of 5.8 marks out of 10, while their male counterparts gave themselves 7.6. In reality, their average was almost the same: the females got 7.5 out of 10 and the males 7.9. Therefore, the self-doubts of our girls are often unjustified.
Celebrate risk
Our fear of making mistakes is also closely linked to a lack of confidence in our own ability. In my experience, it is most often (but not exclusively) higher-ability girls who find it most difficult to learn from their mistakes. A lifetime of being told how brilliant they are means they see mistakes as failure, a personal criticism rather than an opportunity to grow.
So how does all this translate into our teaching of girls? We need to emphasise that learning does not come from getting things right all the time but rather that it comes from perseverance and resilience. The benefits of failure and risk-taking need to be explicitly outlined and celebrated. Here’s some practical tips I’ve found have worked in my classroom:
- Share (within reason!) your own tales of risk-taking and failing.
- Wrong answers can be positive when the entire class can benefit from exploring the reasons why: reward such answers!
- Promote the journey more than the final product. For example, plan projects where pupils have to record their initial piece of work and every step taken thereafter to improve it.
- Use open-ended tasks with no right answer to reduce the fear of failure.
- To develop confidence, limit the number of questions a group can ask within a set timeframe. Once they have asked used up their question allowance, they need to try to work things out on their own.
Claire Narayanan is assistant headteacher at Levenshulme High School, Manchester
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