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If you have, or hope to have, the kind of classroom where students do more than just sit and listen, it’s likely that your plans may include activities that require some social risk-taking. For example, if you would like to have class discussions, students have to be willing to say things out loud in front of their peers. If everyone is too shy, then you don’t have a discussion.
Or suppose you have come up with a song to help your students remember a set of facts in your subject area. The song has some movements that go with it. This is an excellent way to help us remember stuff, and it works well past elementary school. For the song to work best, your students will have to stand up, sing, and do the movements. If they all feel self-conscious and no one wants to do it, there goes your fun little song.
If you happen to have a group of confident students who lean toward extroversion, this won’t be a problem. But that’s rarely what we get, especially during the years when students become more socially self-conscious, like between the ages of around 10 till around 16. And those are prime learning years. It would be a real shame to limit our classroom experiences to only the most low-stakes, vanilla activities where no one has to ever risk looking silly. How forgettable that would be.
So one way to help your students get more comfortable taking these small social risks is for you to be the first dork, the first one to do the thing that no one else wants to do because they’re afraid of looking weird or being vulnerable. It’s kind of like when you go to an event where there’s a buffet, and no one wants to be the first one to start getting food. If one person grabs a plate and starts going down the line, that gives everyone else permission to do the same. You need that first person to take that little social risk, and in your classroom, if no one else goes, that person can be you.
- Suppose you’re doing a simulation where you want students to take on the role of molecules in different states of matter — solids, liquids, and gases. This will require students to move around the room at increasing levels of energy, and it could get quite silly. If they’re shy about doing this, it will loosen them up if you demonstrate with exaggerated movements and get them to laugh at you.
- If you’re assigning a persuasive speech, write your own and present it to students before they even start the assignment. And don’t just phone it in; do a bang-up job with passion and spirit, so they can see what it looks like to put yourself out there when speaking publicly.
- Tell stories about your own history where you made mistakes, felt scared, tried something new, or learned something new. While these stories need to be school-appropriate, and you never want to monopolize class time every day by droning on and on about yourself, an occasional personal story will broaden your students’ window on the world and will create an environment where they feel more comfortable sharing their own experiences.
- Share your hobbies, your interests, your odd fascinations. Doing this gives everyone permission to do the same and pushes back on the pressure to conform that limits and narrows everyone’s possibilities.
Yes, you’re there to teach your curriculum, but you’re also there as one of many examples of how to be human. And modeling a willingness to be vulnerable and take a few social risks is one way you can enrich students’ lives, get them participating more fully in experiences that will help them learn, and make your classroom more fun.
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