Why can not taking risks be a risky business?
Matthew O'Reilly explores the important role that risk-taking has to play.
Our education promotes a core set of values, rooted in the life of our Foundress, Mary Ward, a 17th century pioneer of education for girls. Her vision for education is defined in 12 Characteristics that shape everyday life at St Mary’s, one of which is ‘coping with failure’, a key aspect of resilience.
In recent years, resilience has become a popular term in education. Educators and parents are being encouraged to develop resilience, to enable our young people to better manage life’s challenges. But what makes us resilient? Which particular skills and attitudes help us to be resilient, to face difficult situations or failure with effective coping skills, that allow us to 'get through’ or ‘bounce back’?
In Junior School, we pro-actively encourage some of the skills that underpin resilience, from the Early Years onwards. As a High Performance Learning School, we focus on key cognitive skills that help our girls to cope well with failure, such as learning to plan and self-regulate, whilst also building the foundations of logical, critical and flexible ways of thinking.
Why do we need to take risks?
To really build resilience, it is important that our young people experience risk. Risk taking in education or in parenting can feel very counter-intuitive. We naturally want to protect our young people. We risk assess everything, minimise hazards and keeping ‘everyone safe’ is always a priority.
However, if we shelter children from risk completely – we aren’t preparing them effectively for life. The future will bring tricky situations, those testing times where we have to feel the fear and do it anyway. Part of succeeding in life relies on a capacity to take calculated risks, manage fears and to cope, if things go wrong.
Resilience is facing your fears
Children often see only two options when faced with a difficult task – tackle it head or avoid it. However, we can encourage them to face a challenge, by moving towards it in smaller, manageable steps – this makes risk feel less scary and more achievable.
Resilience asks for bravery
By giving children space to challenge themselves, they experience bravery – even if the end result isn’t what they hoped for. This enables them to see how they can change and shape their own future by being brave, knowing that they can cope if a particular path doesn’t work out.
Resilience relies on failure
It is tempting to rush in and stop children feeling that they have ‘failed’. Sometimes we do need to help, reassure and boost them back up – but not always. To be resilient, children have to learn how to pick themselves up, when they face a set-back. These early experiences help us to manage stress later in life. It’s all about building up that calm inner voice that reminds us we can cope in tough times.
Go forth and embrace a risk!
We encourage our girls to embrace risk. It is all about finding a comfortable level of risk for each individual child. This could be climbing a tree or diving under water or taking centre stage for a performance. Whatever the challenge, it is important to make it fun, feel the fear and do it anyway. Without realising it, those crucial coping skills, healthy thinking habits and attitudes that build resilience will be flourishing while they are busy having fun!
More about our approach to education