Fearless Classrooms: Building Resilience and Psychological Safety for Students, Staff, and Communities

By Douglas Reeves

When students are afraid, they cannot learn.  In “Fearless Classrooms,” Dr. Douglas Reeves explains how teachers and school administrators can provide psychological safety for every student and staff member.  In a fearless classroom, students can make mistakes and learn from those mistakes without being afraid of embarrassment and humiliation.  Rather than toxic practices such as evaluating students based on mistakes made months in the past, fearless classrooms evaluate students based on their performance at the time the grade is awarded.  Every mistake is not a disgrace, but an opportunity to learn. “Fearless Classrooms” provides a guide for every educator and school leader to create a safe environment for  every student to learn and grow both intellectually and emotionally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Feb 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9781665754170

Douglas Reeves

Dr. Douglas Reeves is the author of more than 40 books and 100 articles on leadership and education. He was twice named to the Harvard University Distinguished Authors Series and several other national and international awards for his contributions to education. Doug is the founder of Creative Leadership Solutions and the nonprofit Equity and Excellence Institute, serving schools and educational systems in fifty states and more than 40 countries.

Book preview

Copyright © 2024 Douglas Reeves.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of nonfiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5416-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5415-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5417-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023923443

Archway Publishing rev. date: 02/23/2024

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1: Why Students and Teachers Need to be Fearless

Chapter 1: The Psychological Safety Imperative

Chapter 2: The Neuroscience of Fearless Learning

Chapter 3: Why Fearless Learning is Hard

Chapter 4: Fearless Students Need Fearless Teachers

Chapter 5: Fearless Teachers Need Fearless Leaders

Part 2: Courage: How to be Fearless in a Fearful Place

Chapter 6: Why Schools Are Fearful

Chapter 7: How Policies Drive Fear

Chapter 8: Fearless Teachers

Chapter 9: Fearless Parents

Chapter 10: Fearless Students

Part 3: Building a Fearless Classroom

Chapter 11: Gratitude

Chapter 12: Progress

Chapter 13: Resilience

Part 4: Fearless Schools

Chapter 14: From the Classroom to the Boardroom

Chapter 15: How Teacher Leadership Propels Change

Chapter 16: How Senior Leaders and Governing Boards Create Fearless Schools

Epilogue

DEDICATION

For Sofia, Max, and Moy—the next generation of fearless teachers and leaders

And for their amazing mom, Lisa Almeida—a fearless leader and faithful friend

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have never been as emotionally invested in a book as the one you are holding in your hands. In this post-pandemic era, too many classrooms are fearful places, not merely due to the fear of illness, but also due to the fear of violence, fear of threatening behavior, fear of intimidation at public meetings, fear of financial insecurity as federal and state funds evaporate, and fear of loneliness that remains pervasive in society (Murthy, 2020). Teachers are afraid of toxic evaluation systems. Administrators are afraid of virulent and unjust attacks in the press and during board meetings. Students are afraid that, after years of isolation, they won’t fit in or communicate successfully with their peers. Parents are afraid that their children have missed learning opportunities that may not be recovered.

The only antidote I know to fear is what I might call belligerent optimism—the sure and certain confidence that our best days in education are ahead of us. Emotions are contagious, and just as the fear and anxiety of adults is telegraphed to children, our optimism, however irrational it may appear at times, can also transmit to our colleagues the confidence that it takes to persist in challenging times.

Perhaps the best source of optimism is gratitude, a daily discipline I recommend to every reader. These acknowledgments are a small way of recognizing those to whom I am immensely grateful in the creation of this book. I am, as the National Public Radio Car Talk guys used to say, on the third half of life. To mix poets and metaphors, I do not intend to go gently into that good night and I still have miles to go before I sleep. Until that sleep falls, I would like to thank the following people.

Lisa Almeida is the Chief Executive Officer of Creative Leadership Solutions, an organization of more than sixty professionals serving students in fifty states and more than forty countries. An amazing and courageous woman, she is the inspiration for this book. For the more than twenty years we have worked together, she has recruited and trained the best and brightest educators on the planet, who seek to make a difference in education. She has established extraordinary standards for client service and has served as a model for what exemplary service means. She did this all while raising three amazing kids who, in a rarity for the 21st century, spend more time digging in the dirt, creating cities out of junk, and inventing new games than being glued to electronic devices. She is a true and loyal friend, and I am lucky beyond belief to be in her orbit.

Andrew Reeves is a generous and decent man, under-appreciated for his philanthropy and kindness. Steve Reeves, a retired Major General, dedicated his life to serving his country during our most trying hours. Julie Reeves enters her second century of life teaching, writing, and caring for her friends and neighbors. I want to be like her when I grow up.

Amy Edmondson (2018) is the intellectual inspiration for the idea of fearless organizations. I am similarly indebted to Susan Brookhart, Luis Cruz, the late Rick and Becky DuFour, Robert Eaker, Tom Guskey, Audrey Kleinsasser, Bob Marzano, Mike Mattos, Anthony Muhammed, Ken O’Connor, and Rick Wormeli—all of whom have influenced my thinking about fearless classrooms, even when I occasionally disagreed with them. Dr. Guskey, the dean of educational researchers, challenged my use of the term fearless, noting that people with my military background should know that fearlessness in battle can be foolhardy and dangerous. I always appreciate Tom’s thoughtful challenges, and I will endeavor in these pages to distinguish between irrational fearlessness and the fearlessness that is necessary to create classroom environments in which children and adults can make mistakes without fear of shame and humiliation. In the context of the classroom, fearlessness is not foolhardy but the launching pad for learning, as every mistake leads to the joy of discovery.

My colleagues at Creative Leadership Solutions are a constant source of inspiration and information, and I learn from them every day. They include Jodi Anderson, Allyson Apsey, Kate Barker, Andrea Bobo, Jennifer Bourgeois, Michelle Cleveland, Washington Collado, Kayce Cook, Lori Cook, Alan Crawford, Christy de Zayas, Karisa DeSantis, Howard Fields, Tony Flach, Kate Anderson Foley, Emily Freeland, Rachael George, Pam Gildersleeve-Hernandez, Amanda Gomez, Jessica Gomez, Cedrick Gray, Neil Gupta, Laura Hudson, Nichole Johnson, Jessyca Lucero-Flores, Krissy Machamer, Kim Marshall, Jonelle Massey, Christina Melton, Terry Metzger, Peter Ondish, Ann McCarty Perez, Michelle Picard, Marisa Rivas, Christine Smith, Melissa Stephanski, Bill Sternberg, Majalise Tolan, Dru Tomlin, Greg Vanhorn, Pam Vanhorn, Bianca Vega, Jo Verver-Peters, and Michael Wasta. I wish to especially acknowledge Dr. Wasta, whose Oops-grams—a public confession of his mistakes and how the entire educational system can learn from those mistakes—are now the stuff of legendary leadership.

While I happily share credit for the insights and inspiration of the people who are listed in these acknowledgments, I alone bear responsibility for the inevitable errors and omissions.

Douglas Reeves

Boston, Massachusetts

March 2024

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 a forty-five-year-old. Fear is the enemy of learning. The sole purpose of this book is to drive fear out of 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 beginning 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 roles of school administrators, instructional coaches, and others who support teachers are vital contributions 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.

Part 3 considers the building blocks of a fearless classroom. We begin with gratitude, an emotional and psychological essential of a healthy life. It is not always easy to be grateful when students misbehave, when parents are demanding, and policymakers are demeaning. But grateful we must be, as the children we serve are gifts to the world, even when they may not act that way. One way to stimulate gratitude is to notice the daily progress that students make. Think of it as the perfect experiment—it’s the same student with the same parents, the same home environment, the same attendance, the same nutrition, the same everything. The only variable in the equation is the classroom teacher. We get to watch them, day by day, read with confidence, make new friends, write with clarity, solve increasingly complex problems. There is no greater joy in teaching than to observe this progress. We do not necessarily see this progress in state test scores or grades in report cards, but rather in the day-to-day improvements in student performance. Music teachers know this, as do athletic coaches. But what happens when progress doesn’t happen? When students fail? When despair prevails over optimism? This is our finest hour as teachers. We pick students up, dust them off, and give them the greatest gift we can offer—resilience in the face of adversity.

Part 4 addresses the leaders and policymakers who must, as a moral duty, guarantee fearless schools. It is easy to take pot-shots at school board members, legislators, and senior leaders. They live in the political realm far afield of the classroom, but they also deserve our respect, as they stand—especially in the post-pandemic world—in the face of withering criticism, are usually paid little or nothing for their efforts, and are nevertheless expected to stoically absorb abuse—sometimes verbal, sometimes physical—during public comment periods in which constituents apparently do not understand the difference between civil discourse and unforgiveable abuse. If we want fearless classrooms—places of psychological safety for students—then we must have fearless board meetings, cabinet meetings, and public forums in which a wide variety of views are welcome, but abuse is not tolerated.

69036.png

PART 1

WHY STUDENTS AND TEACHERS NEED TO BE FEARLESS

69051.png

Oxytocin is a powerful chemical in the brain that drives learning. When students are confident risk-takers, joyfully making mistakes and learning with each stumble—think of the toddler learning to walk—they are never ashamed of their mistakes but rather learn from each stumble (Gopnik, 2016). Many readers have observed babies saying their first words, finding their first tentative steps, and recognizing a face or perhaps even a word on the page. We celebrate every success and ignore the myriad mistakes that preceded those successes. Can you imagine the adult who berates a child for falling while learning to walk? We cheer for every step, however awkward, as they stumble into our waiting arms.

But in a few short years, those cheers are silenced. The joyful toddlers shuffle into schools uncertain and afraid. What if I’m not good enough? one student thinks. What if I have on the