Fearless Classrooms

Introduction

When children are afraid, they cannot learn. It is the primary duty of every teacher and school administrator to create a fearless environment for learning. These responsibilities include not only the removal of fears for physical safety – violence, bullying, and harassment – but also fears for psychological safety. When every wrong answer, tentative attempts to please the teacher, or apprehension by teachers that they may fail to please the administrators who are watching are the sources of paralyzing fear, then learning is impossible, whether the learning is attempted by a four-year-old or forty-five-year-old. Fear is the enemy of learning. The sole purpose of this book is to drive out fear from classrooms and schools.

Recall your own experiences as a student. Perhaps you were fearless and enthusiastic, thrusting your hand in the air at every opportunity, praised by your teachers and envied by your classmates. There might have been other classes, by contrast, where fear pervaded the classroom. Any wrong answer, or even a tentative answer, was greeted with disapproval and a stunning feeling of shame and humiliation. Of course, you covered it up well, perhaps with a smirk or even a taunt at the smarty-pants who invariably had the right answer. But the disapproval nevertheless stung. That is the hidden fearful environment that pervades too many classrooms.

I don’t think that teachers intend to create fearful classrooms. They want to re-create the classrooms that they loved. Many teachers knew from an early age that they aspired to become their role models – their teachers – who were kind, authoritative, and wise. I know that I did. I remember the names of every wonderful teacher I had, and I still aspire to be like them.

Yet in my travels around the world, I continue to encounter classrooms that are full of fear, intimidation, and anger. The teachers in these classrooms are not bad people, but they are deeply angry. They are angry at inattentive parents who have displaced interpersonal relationships with electronics in the cradle. They are angry at the presumption, whenever controversy arises, that the child is right, and the teacher is wrong. They are angry about the weight of initiative fatigue in which every bright shiny object becomes the next priority of the school, with one initiative piled on top of another.

School leaders are also angry, caught between the vise of parental demands and teachers’ distress. They face public meetings that are increasingly abusive, in which freedom of speech is conflated with freedom to slander. Civil discourse – the fundamental freedom to disagree about policy matters – has been displaced with threats not only to educational leaders but also to their families. Social media has further fueled this abuse with the posting of the home addresses and family pictures of school leaders on hate-filled web sites.

This is, in sum, a fearful time in education. But it is not too late to change this. This book is a clarion call for fearlessness. I do not expect to change the hearts and minds of the haters, but I do think it is possible to embolden teachers and educational leaders to stay true to their values and, most importantly, secure the psychological safety of the students they serve.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 presents the evidence of why fearless education is imperative. It includes the neuroscience evidence that demonstrates without equivocation that oxytocin – the chemical that drives learning – is depleted by fear. We also acknowledge how difficult the teaching profession is. Every reader remembers what it was like to be a first-year teacher, and, in this post-pandemic world, we are all first-year teachers now. We are struggling with learning loss (Kuhfeld and Tarasawa 2020)(World Bank 2021), behavioral disruptions, staff shortages, and exhausted and burned-out colleagues. But as Senator Elizabeth Warren was famously accused, “Nevertheless, she persisted.” (Wang 2017). So may it be for every teacher and school leader. Although this book is focused on the classroom teacher, the role of school administrators, instructional coaches, and others who support teachers is a vital contribution to this work. Every new initiative, administrative directive, and evaluative scheme, however well intentioned, is a potential distraction from the primary obligation of every teacher – to help children learn. If we are to have fearless classrooms, then we need fearless leaders. Fearless leaders will protect teachers from distractions, from mindless data-entry duties, and from meetings that are without purpose.

Part 2 addresses the Stoic virtue of courage. Without the perspective of the ancients, it is too easy to associate courage with the battlefield, the soldier who rushes the hill to take out the machine gun, the marine who falls on the grenade to save others, or the paratrooper who drops behind enemy lines, at great peril, to secure the landing zone for other troops. But courage is sometimes silent and unrecognized. It is the teacher who, when confronted with an angry parent, says, “I can’t tell you that Margaret is proficient when she is not. I love her and respect her, but I can’t lie to her.” It is the school administrator who says, “Mr. Jackson, you are telling students that they are doing great work when their work is demonstrably not proficient. Telling the truth in 21st century education is a courageous act, and we need you to act with courage.”