Psychological Safety in the Classroom

0:22 Hello, everyone, and welcome back. This is the Road to an Effective Classroom Environment, and I am your host, Lashonta, and I am so happy that you are back with me again. Some of you may be on your summer break already, lounging around the pool, or you're at the beach, or you've gone on a trip to Vegas, and then there may be some of you that still have one or two weeks left. Well, I hope that you are enjoying your vacation. This is a time to revitalize yourself, rejuvenate, and get prepared for the next upcoming school year.

1:03 If you're still in school, just hang on in there. Your time is coming. But please make sure that you are taking the time to spend with your family, with your friends. Because, as I said, this is a time for you to get rejuvenated, re-energize, and I will continue giving you episodes even through the summer because it's all about preparation. You're getting yourself ready for your next set of students. And I know many times we don't want to think about the next school year, but what makes us effective is that we think and plan a little bit during our break.

1:43 You know, sometimes we have those ideas that come to us while we're driving or when we're on the beach. We may think of a neat activity, and you might want to have yourself a notebook or a journal in which you write this information down because you're always trying to perfect your craft. But again, as I said, don't forget to enjoy your time away from the building. And if you are in a position in which you're still in the building, create yourself some type of staycation so that even on the weekends, if you haven't planned a big vacation for yourself where you're going out of town, you can at least do some things around your city, going to museums, going to the park, picking up an activity that you have not done in a while, or being adventurous and picking up an activity that you wanted to try out.

2:39 But whatever level you are in, please make sure that you get back in touch with refreshing yourself so that you can fine-tune your craft. Okay. And today we are going to talk about psychological safety in our classrooms. And I got the idea from listening to a TED talk last week. And this was a TED Talk that was given by Amy Edmondson, and she is a professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. And so, in her TED talk, it was about a 12-minute TED talk, a little less, and she was talking about psychological safety in the workplace, and specifically talking about the fields in healthcare and in certain business industries.

3:36 But I started thinking about psychological safety as it applies to our classroom situations, because this is an important element for us as educators, as teachers, in making sure that our students have that safe haven in our classrooms. And so we're going to take a look at how do we build psychological safety in the classrooms because, again, it's all about having that effective classroom environment. And one way of being effective in the classroom and having an effective classroom environment is making sure that your students feel safe, not just physically, but we also want to take care of their psychological safety.

4:24 So, Edmondson, she defined psychological safety as a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. So, two key words that jumped out at me when I was listening to this was punished and humiliated. And these are terms that we oftentimes we hear in our setting, in our education setting, where students may be punished for behaviors that they display or things that they may say, or they may be humiliated by students, or unfortunately, sometimes humiliated humiliated by teachers as well, or educators in general.

5:16 So those two words stuck out to me because we want to make sure that these are things that we're not doing in our classrooms. We want our students to feel that they can be open to ask questions or if they have concerns to come to us.

5:36 Students do not want to look as if they are ignorant, just unknowledgeable, and the word that many times that they like to use, looking stupid, and they don't want to look like they're incompetent. And the ways that they feel ignorant is by asking questions because they feel as if they don't know, then that makes them look as if they are stupid. But in a classroom setting, in a school setting, in life in general, we have to be able to feel comfortable to ask questions of those around us in order to gain knowledge.

6:16 And then students sometimes may feel as if they're incompetent if they make a mistake. We all make mistakes, and our rooms must be safe havens for them that mistakes are okay. Mistakes help us to get to where we need to be. So one of the tasks that we have in our classrooms is to make sure we're helping our students to not feel incompetent and not feel ignorant. We want to make sure that we prevent this by not being the problem ourselves. Well, how can we as the adults be a problem in making our students feel ignorant or making them feel incompetent?

7:06 We make it a problem by us being the ones who are humiliating the children or punishing them. And there's a difference in building a safe haven where children know that it's okay to laugh or it's okay to make comments. You have to make sure if that's the environment that you're wanting to build, that it's okay. Everyone in that room has to understand that there's a difference between laughing because you want that person to feel bad about the question or comment that he or she has made, and then laughing because we all are laughing together because something's funny.

7:54 There is a difference when children or adults are asking or are looking at the students and they're hearing things coming out another student's mouth that just doesn't sound correct. The way that we cause psychological danger in our rooms is by laughing at the child or trying to humiliate the child by calling that child named.

8:56 If we're not careful about what we are bringing in, our students bring baggage, we bring baggage. And if we all are exposing all of our baggage in that room, then how much learning is actually taking place? So we as the adults, we have to be very careful about our presence in the classroom, that teacher presence that we talked about in episode seven. We have to make sure that we're not a part of the problem as to why students do not feel psychologically safe in our rooms. Being careful of our words that we use with them.

9:49 Building those relationships, you also have to tie in the expectations. How am I going to set up my expectations for my students? What is it that I want them to be able to do in my classroom? What are the boundaries? What are some things that I want to make sure that they know are not okay? And in helping with that psychological safety, adding in to your expectations that when students ask questions, it's not okay to laugh unless it's something that you have agreed upon as a class. Many times teachers will incorporate at least one or two rules or one or two expectations that the students come up with themselves.

10:40 And that may be something that the students come up with. You know, we're not going to laugh at someone that asks a question, no matter how it may sound, because there may be other students in that room that are thinking of that same question. So psychological safety is very important in making sure that as the classroom teacher, we are not hindering our students from learning because we're not making them feel safe to ask questions or to make mistakes. We have to make sure that the other students in that classroom, all students in that classroom, must be able to feel safe.

11:24 Now, will you have where 100% of your students are going to feel safe to ask anything that they need to ask within the educational perspective? Does that mean you're going to have a hundred percent after the first month of school? No, it doesn't. You may have those students that have issues that go deeper beyond just what's going in that classroom. You could have students that are dealing with abuse at home. You could have students who are dealing with sexual orientation. You may have students that are dealing with a gambit of different things.

12:04 And no matter what you may try to do, it may take longer for you to reach those students because of those difficulties that they have going on. And see, that goes back to learning your students. You have to learn who they are. You may not always know everything that's going on with them, but you have to have a discerning understanding of the students that you have coming to see you every day. You can't just look at your students as being just a number, a piece of data, or just a first and a last name, because you don't want your students to just see you in that way.

12:51 You want to be able to get to the core of what type of student you are dealing with, and that applies to each and everyone that comes into your classroom. Does that take time? Yes, and as we said in previous episodes, it takes time to know who your students are. That's why it does not just take the first day of school, the first week of school. It is a process that goes throughout the entire school year, and for some, it may go on the duration of that child's life because you may make those connections where you're still learning who your children are.

13:34 And as they become adults and they go out in the world, have their own families, you may continue to have the to have the the pleasure of knowing them beyond school and seeing them grow into these adults with their own families. So psychological safety is one of those, one of those topics is very, very important. And I want to make sure that we understand why it's important. Your students being able to feel safe in your classrooms every day will help the process of learning go a lot smoother in your classrooms.

14:17 If they feel comfortable asking questions, they feel comfortable making mistakes because they know it's a part of the learning process, then they will be eager to learn, eager to grow. The enthusiasm and their energy that we see in elementary students when we go into an elementary school, the kids are so eager to learn, and they can ask all types of questions. And whether the questions are on target or not, how it's handled by the teachers, it will impact whether that child asks any questions for the rest of that school year, and sometimes even throughout their career as a student.

15:08 That same excitement and energy we see and can see in the secondary level in our middle and high schools. But depending on just how much we have thrown at us that we feel we can't handle, and again, that was another episode where we talked about you have to look at things in perspective. Time is not your enemy. Time is not an enemy at all. And when you look at time as being on your side, even if you feel like it's not, you have to put it in your mindset that I can do this, I can organize this lesson, I can get these papers graded, I can get this done because I've already purposed it in my mind that I am going to be successful because each and every student that I teach is depending on me.

15:57 So going back, and I want to just re-emphasize the definition one last time before I close out. Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. So as you process that information, make sure that you have some piece that you go over with your students in your expectations. When you talk about your classroom expectations and you talk about your classroom management plan, which was another episode, make sure that as you're going through this information, do a self-check.

16:41 Check yourself. Am I making sure? Am I looking at my students? And am I making sure that my students feel comfortable with me, not only just me, but our your students must also feel comfortable with the other students in that class. And that is a whole nother episode in talking about relationship building with the students and how you can do that. But this has been another episode of The Road to an Effective Classroom Environment. I am your host, Lashonta. Thank you so much for joining me, and I will see you next time.