Psychological Safety in Education, Academia and Teaching

Teaching and Learning Practices

This article by our own placement student Bea Poyton describes psychological safety in the classroom both at school and university, from the perspective of the student. It’s a powerful piece and valuable for educators and students alike.

“3 Ideas to Level Up Learning” by Lauren Kaufman: We really like the “Tell Stories, Build Bridges, Cultivate Connections” trifecta not just for educators but for us all as a simple model to create an effective learning environment.

This is a great practical piece about online learning and teaching. Learning online has become the new reality for most of us and here, Ceca Bunjevac and Steven Shorrock share lessons from online teaching and facilitation. Some handy tips and reminders in this piece.

Here’s a great piece for those working in education: the switch to virtual environments, making changes to classrooms, and adapting curriculums and methods in light of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to big challenges for teachers and educators. This article includes a checklist that should help educators recognise the tangible actions they can take to build positive school leadership.

Here’s an excellent piece by Noble Ingram, interviewing Douglas Reeves about psychological safety for teachers and educators: in reflecting on the impact of the pandemic, “because we were in an environment where we had to try new things and improve them or abandon them, there was an imperative to admit when there’s a mistake, fix it, and go back to work.” Sometimes that environment of permissive candour is created through circumstances outside your control.

This is an excellent piece about the practice of teaching Physical Education, and how providing a psychologically safe space for children to explore physical activity not only encourages them to simply get involved, but facilitates more effective learning and improvement. “How can a willingness to have a go, perform and learn occur if children are frightened to do so? How can delight, enjoyment and flourishing through movement happen if all I do is try to manage their behaviour?“

Students value Socratic (questioning) teaching methods, but often feel humiliated if they get a question wrong. Whilst they don’t feel that is the intention of the teachers, it’s clear that a culture of psychological safety would improve clinical teaching.

Many teachers are often left wondering whether they have wasted their time when, at the end of the lessons, “any questions?” is met with a room of blank faces. This is a good actionable piece: Adopting psychological safety in the classroom: students shouldn’t worry about looking stupid when the whole class knows that asking questions and making mistakes is crucial to learning.

Here’s a great and useful piece from “The Action Hero Teacher” called “6 Rules You Need To Create the Perfect Social Contract“. 

Educational Leadership

This 2017 paper, “Are your students safe to learn? The role of lecturer’s authentic leadership in the creation of psychologically safe environments and their impact on academic performance.” highlights that a classroom environment where students feel psychologically safe to engage, ask questions, and express themselves without fear of negative consequences significantly boosts their academic performance. Researchers also found that high-density networks, where students frequently interact and share knowledge with each other, tend to exhibit better academic outcomes and higher levels of psychological safety.

Psychological safety and literacy – Here’s a great dissertation paper by Joel Beidleman, focused on US Middle Schools which suggests that improved psychological safety correlates with higher literacy achievement.

Psychological Safety in Higher Education and Academia. Here’s a great piece in the Times HE: Universities jeopardise workers’ ‘psychosocial safety’. Thanks to Isabella von Holstein for sharing this one, which definitely aligns with our experiences and findings working with universities. Interestingly our experiences suggest that as well as the speed and volume of work – the sheer capacity burden (as suggested in the article) – psychological safety is often damaged by adversarial environments, competition, the “publish or perish” culture, conflicting priorities between research and teaching, lack of progressive leadership and management, and the huge transition that HE has gone through. Many HE institutional cultures still feel themselves to be research-driven, purely academic entities, when in fact they are to a degree now commercial education providers, and students pay significant fees, so expect a lot in return. That creates internal conflict and a lot of friction between people, departments, and priorities.

The “Teach Like a Champion” (TLAC) approach is apparently very popular in some schools in the US and UK. One of the fundamental premises of TLAC is of 100% compliance of students. The Five Principles of TLAC classroom culture are:

• • Discipline

• • Management

• • Control

• • Influence

• • Engagement

Certainly, a chaotic classroom is poorly suited to learning, and the best classroom environment is calm, safe and engaging, but the apparent prioritisation of discipline and compliance worries us. Compliance should be a baseline –  an enabler, not a goal. How can we expect children to grow into fully rounded people who feel empowered to be their true selves at work, contribute their own unique ideas, admit mistakes, and challenge the status quo, if their formative years have been spent in a culture which prioritises compliance? This is a thoughtful critique of Teach Like A Champion and here’s another. If you’re in education and have thoughts on this, please email jade@psychsafety.co.uk or join us in the slack community to discuss.

“Systems convening” is a description of a type of leadership that sees a social landscape with all its separate and related practices through a wide-angle lens: they spot opportunities for creating safe learning spaces and partnership that will bring different and often unlikely people together to engage in learning across boundaries. Check out this e-book (free download) to learn more and see what principles you may be able to apply.

“Providing Psychological Safety for schools and in the workplace” – an interesting episode in The Stories of Success Podcast interviewing Michael Brennan who has worked to improve psychological safety in schools and workplaces by creating new mechanisms for people to speak up (you will need to scroll to the episode from 1st April 2021 in the list).

Team-based instructional change in undergraduate STEM: characterizing effective faculty collaboration This paper presents five team processes: strategic leadership, egalitarian power dynamics, team member commitment, effective communication, and clear decision-making processes, that shape how teams work together, and three emergent states: shared vision, psychological safety, and team cohesion, that team members perceived as important aspects of how teams feel and think when working together.

This is interesting, Social Representations about Safety among Students and Teachers – examining how “real” safety in educational contexts (such as fear of shootings) and the role of the teacher in their eyes and those of students, impacts psychological safety.

Teacher Development

This newsletter piece looks at blame practices in teaching and the impact on teachers. 

Making it safe(r) to fail in teaching – another newsletter piece about approaches to improve psychological safety for teachers and educators with a particular focus on teachers’ professional development and a wonderful practice called Joint Practice Development.

This is a super video of an interview with Jeremy Hannay, an inspirational school head teacher from Ontario, talking about building great cultures in schools. Skip to 25 minutes in to hear how he made it safe for teachers to experiment and fail safely. His blog is also worth a read.

This is fab, from Alex Rawlings (@MrARawlings on Twitter) at Quarry Bank Primary school, who looked at the role of Psychological Safety in monitoring learning and teaching at school. He says: ‘Monitoring’ carries so much baggage – instead we are ‘Taking the Temperature’. Subtle change, but clearer intent!”

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

I like this piece by David X Crowe on Cognitive Load, the Learning Environment, and Neurodivergent Learners. A crucial point that I appreciate in this, which is one we include in all our psychological safety workshops, is around the educational practices that require “masking” of neurodivergence, such as discouraging stimming or mandating eye contact. These can be particularly burdensome for neurodivergent people, and require people to adopt behaviours that feel unnatural or uncomfortable, creating a significant cognitive load that ultimately reduces our ability to learn.

This newsletter piece focused on stuttering and stammering and it’s worth a read for all teachers – with 1 in 12 young children experiencing at least a phase of stammering, chances are you will be teaching students who stutter or stammer. How you respond to that can have a huge impact on their psychological safety and ability to speak up. 

This is an excellent piece on the EdCan Network website on the importance and dynamics of psychological safety for students. The authors point out that psychological safety and inclusion are interdependent, and psychological safety enables, but does not guarantee, inclusion. Diverse teams perform better, with the foundation of high-performing teams being psychological safety. Crucially, inclusion is a key component of wellbeing and is also one of the primary social determinants of health – students learn best when they feel their best. We also absolutely love that the authors, Kyla Christiansen, Maxine McKenzie-Cox, Pamela Korczak, and Kathleen Lane, have adapted our psychological safety inclusion and diversity pyramid, to show the effect on learning and outcomes. 

In this piece, Sebastian Bromelow, EDI Partner at Kingston University, writes that the metric-centric approach is not up to the job when it comes to equality, diversity and inclusion in higher education.

Good article, but apologies – you have to sign up to THE (for free though) to read it. Anonymous polling platforms to boost student confidence, engagement and inclusivity. 

‘Diversity should just be called reality. Your books, your TV shows, your movies, your articles, your curricula need to reflect reality.’ This is an incredible piece by Gaurav Dubay that reflects psychological safety in the classroom, particularly for minority-ethnic students.
Engaging With Diversity – Giving Pupils a Voice

 This is an incredible paper, and well worth a read if you’re in or around Higher Education: “You never feel so Black as when you’re contrasted against a White background”: Black students’ experiences at a predominantly White institution in the UK, by Lateesha Osbourne, Julie Barnett, & Leda Blackwood of the University of Bath. Feeling that we belong in a group is fundamental to inclusion and to psychological safety. This is a great paper that highlights the lived experiences of Black students in higher education, and highlights the importance of addressing taking account of all students’ histories and the role of White perspectives in shaping Black students’ lives.

This makes for interesting and powerful reading: a study by the Black Education Research Collective on understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic and systemic racism have impacted Black education from the perspectives of Black parents, teachers, students, education and community leaders. It highlights that psychological safety is particularly lacking for black students in the US, and presents a significant challenge in the return to school post-pandemic.

Stimpunks are a group of former technologists turned “wannabe-sociologists interpreting and applying the work of experts”, are autistic, ADHD, bipolar, dyslexic, dyspraxic, and dyscalculic and provide coaching, training and workshops. Here’s a great piece from Ryan about the importance of retesting in educational and training settings in order to build psychological safety, especially for those with “spiky” profiles.

This is interesting: Diversity approaches matter in international classrooms: how a multicultural approach buffers against cultural misunderstandings and encourages inclusion and psychological safety. This paper shows how psychological safety is improved in diverse classrooms (and presumably the same could apply to teams) when the lecturer adopts a multicultural rather than “colourblind” approach. That is – recognising and valuing cultural diversity increases psychological safety through facilitating understanding of cultural differences instead of pretending they’re not there.

Mental Health and Wellbeing

Thanks to Faye McGuinness for signposting me here: The ‘Taking Care of Teachers: Mental Health & Wellbeing Hub’. Including how to create a culture of psychological safety in schools:

Here’s a useful article from Edfuel: Psychological Safety: One ingredient in the recipe for teacher and student wellbeing. The article discusses how a school with high psychological safety is positively correlated with wellbeing, creativity, innovation, and effectiveness. They have effectively ported the Fearless Organisation survey to apply to schools, and I’m interested to hear from teachers about this too.

This paper: “The Moderating Role of Psychological Empowerment on the Relationship between Individualism-Collectivism perceptions and Burnout of Teachers“, which, if I understand it correctly, suggests that (to be potentially over-concise): we are stronger together – and resist burnout more effectively when acting as a collective – but individually we are more susceptible to burnout. Psychological safety however, mitigates the weakness of an individualistic culture.