Structure Brings Safety

Hey 👋

Welcome to December, and the first of 2 tasty snacks on trust before the holidays…

Big idea 🍉

Creating a classroom culture where students feel confident seeking help, admitting their mistakes, and generally sharing their thinking is a powerful pre-condition for effective learning.

Not only does sharing thinking help students to refine their ideas, but it also provides us teachers with valuable insights about their current level of understanding (or misunderstanding), which we can use to adjust our teaching accordingly.

However, for all this to happen, the classroom must be a psychologically safe space, where students can share their (often half-baked) ideas to predictably positive responses—and absolutely zero fear of ridicule—from their teacher and peers. Creating such an environment of trust and security is not easy. It’s less about being ‘nice’ and more about embedding high levels of structure, such as:

• Clear norms and routines around participation: exactly who does what and when, including how peers are expected to respond (ideally positively, using some kind of verbal or non-verbal signal), and modelling from the teacher.

• A shared narrative of mutual respect and responsibility: that we value and show reverence for all (genuine) contributions, no matter how off-the-mark they are.

• Swift and severe consequences for anyone breaking this social contract: making it clear that ridiculing contributions is one of the worst offences because it can suppress all future learning

When our students know how to act and what to expect, they can focus all their attention on learning, not navigating uncertainty (which is especially appreciated by our most vulnerable children). In the classroom, structure isn’t stigmatising or constraining—it’s inclusive and liberating. Structure brings safety.

NOTE: Psychological safety can have a range of benefits when fostered amongst staff in school, but it’s also best paired with appropriate accountability.

🎓 For more, check out this evidence synthesis of psychological safety in healthcare.

Summary

• The best classrooms are those where students feel confident to share their thinking without negative response.

• To enable this psychological safety, we need to provide clear expectations, norms, routines, and accountability.

• In the classroom, structure isn’t constraining—it’s liberating.

Little updates 🥕

• Study exploring self-explanation in physics → suggests that giving students guided prompts to explain their mistakes helps them fix errors and apply learning to similar problems (although not very different ones).

• Paper testing how mental revisiting affects memory → finds that memory improves the more often an item is mentally revisited, but not from how long it’s revisited, showing that frequent revisits matter more than prolonged focus.

• Analysis of feedback orientation in new teachers → suggests it boosts confidence in handling feedback but doesn’t predict teaching improvement (though social awareness influences early performance ratings).

• Working paper on school Heating, Cooling, And Ventilation → finds that better HCAV facilities tends to lead to fewer absences and suspensions, and small gains in learning.

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