Imagine you’re in a staff meeting. The headteacher announces a new initiative: everyone will teach a lesson outside their subject specialism next term, observed and filmed for CPD purposes.

How do you feel?

Now imagine a different scenario: your head of department asks if you’d like to try a new pedagogical approach in a class that you know well, with students you trust, and offers to co-plan the lesson with you.

In both cases you are being asked to try something new, but the conditions are very different. In the first scenario, you’re being asked to be vulnerable in an area where you already feel exposed. In the second, you’re being invited to experiment from a position of security.

As adults, we understand that we won’t innovate when we feel threatened, judged or out of our depth without support. Yet we often forget this when working with students.

In schools, we are constantly telling young people to take risks - to be bold, creative and to stretch beyond their comfort zone. But how often do we ask whether we’ve made them feel safe enough to do so?

The problem with ‘just take risks’

The language of modern education is soaked in courage. We celebrate ”growth mindsets”, “challenge zones” and “productive struggle”. We design lessons to be deliberately difficult, believing that discomfort drives learning. But comfort and challenge are not opposites, and more often than not, feeling comfortable is a precondition of growth.

Think back to that staff meeting scenario. When we feel unsafe - socially, emotionally or professionally - we don’t rise to challenge. We protect ourselves. We nod along without engaging. We find reasons why it won’t work. In other words, we perform compliance while avoiding genuine risk.

Students do exactly the same thing. When they feel unsafe in a classroom, they don’t embrace challenge. They might copy their neighbour, do the bare minimum or simply disengage. Alternatively, they might redirect their energy towards the social performance of challenging behaviour, where the risks feel more manageable and the rewards more immediate.

Why is this? Psychologist Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety in the workplace shows that the environment makes a huge difference to our willingness to take risks. She has found that teams only innovate when they trust that they won’t be humiliated, punished or diminished for trying something uncertain.

Edmonson’s findings echo earlier research that most teachers will already be familiar with: Abraham Maslow’s work on the hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s theory explains how higher-order pursuits such as creativity, problem-solving and self-actualisation only become possible once a child’s foundational needs, such as safety and belonging, are met. A student worrying about social rejection or academic humiliation cannot simultaneously engage in exploratory thinking, Maslow argues. Security, therefore, must come before growth.

And there’s a neurological dimension to this that makes it especially pertinent in secondary schools. Adolescent brains are wired for risk-taking, but not in the thoughtful, considered way we might hope.

The limbic system, including the amygdala (responsible for emotion, threat detection and social sensitivity), develops earlier than the prefrontal cortex (responsible for planning, impulse control and evaluating consequences). This means teenagers are biologically primed to seek novelty and take risks, particularly in socially charged contexts, but that their capacity to assess and manage those risks lags behind.

This developmental window is designed to push young people towards independence, experimentation and learning through experience. But if we don’t channel this risk-seeking energy into academic or creative spaces, it will flow elsewhere. When classrooms feel socially unsafe (dominated by peer judgement, public failure or rigid correctness), students’ natural drive to experiment may show up as challenging behaviour.

You might think that this does not apply to those students who are typically well-behaved and high-attaining. But the reality is that those students whom we encourage the most to take intellectual risks are often the least comfortable in taking them.

High-attaining students have been rewarded, repeatedly, for being right. They’re “the clever ones”. This identity is precious, but also fragile.

Taking a real intellectual risk - proposing a controversial interpretation, admitting uncertainty or writing something structurally experimental - means facing the possibility of being wrong. And being wrong threatens the very foundation of who they believe they are. So they don’t take that risk. They stay within the narrow band of what they know they can execute flawlessly. They produce polished, predictable work that meets every rubric criterion but contains no genuine thought.

Lower-attaining students avoid risk because they fear failure: “I can’t do this.”

Higher-attaining students avoid risk because they fear imperfection: “I should be able to do this perfectly.”

Both groups display the same behaviour - risk aversion - but that behaviour stems from different places. They are protecting different things and so need different interventions to make them feel safe.

This matrix helps to illustrate what that might look like:

This is why simply asking students to “just have a go” won’t necessarily work. A student in the perfectionism quadrant doesn’t need encouragement; they need to see that imperfection is acceptable and even valuable.

So, what can teachers do to build classrooms where all students feel secure enough to be uncomfortable and take risks?

A good first step is to audit your current practice. Pay attention to your lessons over a week, and look for examples of the following:

Social risk (often unproductive)

• Students test boundaries through humour or mild defiance.
• Peer dynamics dominate decision-making.
• Students perform for social status and take risks to gain peer approval.
• Physical restlessness or attention-seeking behaviour.

Academic risk (productive)

• Students volunteer uncertain answers.
• Students ask “what if” or “why” questions unprompted.
• Students share work in progress without defensiveness.
• Students revisit and revise their thinking publicly.
• Students attempt extension tasks voluntarily.
• Students debate ideas rather than defend positions.

Ultimately, if students aren’t taking academic risks, they’re likely taking social ones. Adolescent brains will seek risk and stimulation. The question is whether we’ve made the academic space feel rewarding enough to capture that energy.

If your audit tells you that social risk is dominating your classroom, you can try these five strategies.

1. Create relational safety first

Before anything else, invest in your classroom relationships. Students take risks with teachers they trust. That means teachers who know their names, notice when they’re struggling and respond with curiosity rather than judgement.

To demonstrate this, take the time to learn something personal about each student that is not related to their academic performance. Greet them personally when they enter your room and follow up on previous conversations you have had: “How did that football match go?” or “Did you finish that book you were telling me about?”

If a student makes a mistake, respond with something like, “Tell me more about your thinking,” rather than, “No, that’s not right.”

This might sound soft, but it isn’t. You need to view the work of building and strengthening relationships as a structural part of your teaching.

2. Make failure visible and valuable

Students learn what we model, so if we only ever present polished work to them, we communicate that uncertainty is shameful.

A simple solution is to try sharing your own rough draft. This might be a paragraph you wrote, revised and rewrote. Show this to students and narrate your thinking: “I thought this metaphor would work, but when I reread it, it felt forced. So I tried…”

Another option is to establish a “good mistakes gallery”. After attempting a challenging task, ask students to identify the most interesting mistake they made. Display the mistake, and annotate why it was useful, celebrating the thinking behind it.

When students observe their teacher and their peers misunderstanding things and changing their minds, they begin to recognise that being wrong is all part of the learning process.

This is especially powerful for students in the “perfectionism” quadrant. They need repeated evidence that thinking evolves, that early attempts are supposed to be messy and that intellectual risk is what leads to excellence.

3. Reframe the language of success

Alongside this, we need to encourage students to focus on the process of learning, rather than the outcome.

When we praise a “brilliant answer” or “perfect essay”, we reinforce the importance of outcomes. But if we praise an “interesting approach” or say, “I love that you tried something risky here,” we make the process something to celebrate.

High-attaining students need to hear things like, “This sentence doesn’t quite work yet, but I’m fascinated that you attempted it. That’s the kind of thinking that leads somewhere.”

Students avoiding challenges need to hear, “You just proposed a hypothesis that might fail. That’s exactly what scientists do. Let’s test it.”

They need evidence that trying something uncertain is of value, because the possibility of failure is part of the process of being successful.

Consider adopting phrases like “That’s a good risk”, “Interesting mistake; what does it tell us?” or “I can see your thinking evolving here”.

4. Build ‘safe to fail’ structures

Not every task needs to count. In fact, the most powerful learning often happens when nothing counts. So plan opportunities for deliberate low-stakes rehearsal.

This might mean letting students complete a “verbal first draft” by talking through an argument before writing it, or attempting a piece of work collaboratively with a peer before having a go individually.

Introducing “thinking journals”, which provide private space to speculate, wonder and be wrong, can be useful when used regularly. Alternatively, introducing “no stakes Fridays” - where the focus is on sharing rough drafts and half-formed ideas, and practising “thinking aloud” without anything being judged or assessed - can be a good way to get students used to taking academic risks.

5. Redirect risk-taking energy

For students showing social risk-taking behaviours, try to offer academic risks that feel exciting. For example, you might ask them to come up with the hardest question they can about a topic, or ask, “What would happen if we broke this rule in our experiment?”

Remember, the adolescent drive to test boundaries will never disappear, so we need to find ways to give it a better outlet.

Students won’t take intellectual risks just because we tell them to. They’ll take risks when we’ve built the conditions that make risk feel possible: when they know that failure won’t diminish them, when uncertainty is modelled and valued and when the classroom feels like a place where thinking matters more than being right.

We don’t need to stop encouraging students to go beyond their comfort zones, but we do need to start thinking more carefully about whether we have made them feel secure enough to take that chance.

Chris Wynn is head of performing arts at Dene Magna School in Gloucestershire

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