How can you create a safe and supportive environment for teachers to take risks?

To create a safe and supportive environment for teachers to take risks, establish a culture of trust and open communication. Encourage experimentation and innovation in teaching methods. Provide a clear framework for risk-taking, emphasizing that failure is a valuable learning opportunity. Offer professional development resources and training to build confidence. Regularly celebrate successes and constructively review setbacks. Foster collaborative peer networks for sharing experiences and strategies. Ensure that school leadership visibly supports and champions risk-taking initiatives. Implement a feedback system to continuously improve and adapt the approach.

I read that the reason people enjoy rollercoasters is because it can be scary in a controlled environment that only presumes risk. In our work, taking a risk can be a life/death threat to our survival feeling because if it goes wrong our livelihood can be taken away. 💡Administration can provide personal development to help the team understand their own nervous systems and to learn tools necessary for safety in their own bodies in order for them to feel more curious and interested in creating something new. When individuals are given the freedom and directive to dive deeper into their capabilities and begin to thrive, it not only supports the whole program but also creates a supportive growth oriented environment.

In everything, risk is a spectrum and we are all in different areas. What is risky to me might not be risky to you. A school leader needs to leverage their excellent teaching skills to differentiate so that all 'students' can have access to the content, feels safe and 'risk' stepping out of their comfort zone. When you define risk taking as a group, it is important that you are creating a definition that is inclusive and open so that multiple perspectives and 'risks' can fit within that definition. A risk that we wanted to promote in our school was for students to ask questions when they didn't know or needed clarity. As educators, we made that a norm within our PDs and meetings. In the next section I'll explain more.

Growing healthy risk-taking habits requires positive support on behalf of school leaders when innovation fails. Innovation can only fail when teachers are given the opportunity to address a problem in a creative way. The inroad to this is modeling grace, allowing teachers to know the minimum expectations and verbalizing your own preferences as options. If they can think of a better way to provide additional practice beyond the same things that have always been done, tell them to give it a try, and praise the courage to engage in that process if it doesn't turn out well. Evaluations that punish innovation by devaluing failure when a teacher reaches for the stars and only gets half-way, take the school the opposite direction.

Foster peer collaboration and mentorship: Encourage teachers to share their risk-taking experiences and support each other through challenges. Connect teachers with external resources: Facilitate access to experts, communities, or online forums focused on educational innovation and risk-taking. Establish a trusting school environment: Cultivate a climate where vulnerability and experimentation are accepted, and mistakes are seen as opportunities for growth. Recognize and publicly acknowledge teacher risks: Highlight successful initiatives or innovative practices born from teacher risk-taking in staff meetings or school publications.

We modeled asking questions when we need help or don't know something by making it a norm in our meetings. But that is not enough. The norm was, create a culture where it is safe not to know. The action associated with that norm was accountability. This looked like, "What questions do we have about ______?" We created space for questions, there were none, then the leader would ask someone to explain _____. The norm was that if someone didn't ask a question, then they were prepared to explain. Asking someone to explain was not a punishment; it was accountability to living the norm, it is okay to not know and ask questions.

If we genuinely want teachers to take calculated risks, then we genuinely need to mean it and, where appropriate, model it. Teachers will (very) quickly smell a rat if talk of risk-taking is little more than virtue-signalling and confined to INSET seminars. For calculated risk-taking to become an entrenched 'fact on the ground', teachers will need to be supported, encouraged, backed and receive meaningful CPD over the long term.

Some of the most important lessons that I've learnt as a leader towards building a culture that promotes risk taking are : 1. Lead by example - Model that it's ok to take risks and fail. Share these stories, and very importantly, share how risks and failure made you a more effective leader. 2. Create a safe space - Systems that allow team members to do things their own way and come back and share learnings with others. No judgment, no evaluation - just observations and learnings. 3. Reward Risk Taking - Nothing works better than people seeing their team members getting rewarded for taking risks. It signals that status quo is not good enough and we want to be adaptive, agile and creative.

Introduce an Innovation Incubator Program that allows teachers to propose and implement experimental teaching projects. Provide dedicated time and resources for participants to develop and test new instructional methods, technologies, and/or assessment strategies. Foster a culture where risk-taking is encouraged, and celebrate the outcomes, irrespective of success or failure. This approach is designed to instill a sense of autonomy and empowerment among teachers, allowing them to push pedagogical boundaries within a supportive context.