OWLS education

In supporting and educating children in the need to be more resilient, and in order to help prevent the complex mental health issues and extreme anxiety that I am seeing more of when working with youngsters, we need to enable children (and ourselves!) to learn how to fail. But not just learn that it is ok to to fail. The critical learning point is to pick yourself up and try again, and again and again, all the while constantly learning, adjusting and developing successful strategies.

This happens a lot in the outdoor play environment. A child will try to light a fire using a striker and it takes practise…you don’t get instant results. You need to adjust the pressure on the striker, the angle of the strike, the type of tinder you use, the number of tiny sticks you add to build the fire and so on. Children implicitly learn resilience because they are extremely self motivated to succeed when they are playing outside in the woods at OWLS Club.

We also see this in babies learning to sit up….picture a 6 month old wobbling as they sit on their bottom and then toppling forward or backward and hitting the floor. They don’t give up…they persevere. Imagine a 13 month old learning to walk and falling over and over and over again.

As educators, perhaps we should be encouraging children to learn to fail, and then try again. Our teaching culture (particularly in maths) is very focused on success and getting the answers right. Perhaps we should be spending more time on enabling our youngsters to fail and then learn from their setbacks, for example in open-ended and enterprising problem solving. This would not only enable their maths skills to develop and consolidate, but also to develop their resilience and ability to pick themselves up after failure and try again.

As Noel Coward said, “The secret of success is the ability to mange failure.”

This afternoon I was asked to have a chat with a teacher about a particular child in their school. Some of you may know that last January I started doing some work with youngsters who were struggling with the whole primary school environment. One of the topics that came up in our conversation today was the need for children to develop the ability to risk assess their own activities. I have used this opportunity for self-guided learning both in a classroom context and also when working with individuals.

As a class teacher, enabling a whole class to risk assess an outdoor, medieval cooking session opened my eyes to some of the benefits of children participating in group risk assessments. They worked out, through brainstorming together, who and what might be at risk and what these risks might be. They then had the chance to discuss how they might lower these potential risks to a more acceptable level. Once this was achieved we headed outside to do the cooking on a fire.

That afternoon I experienced children actively supporting each other by reminding each other to be careful, reminding each other where they should be walking (to stay safe from the fire) how to move the hot pans and hot food. They looked out for each other and I was redundant as a purveyor of the tedious health and safety. The article below states,

“Because we care about children, and due to shifting societal norms, we can tend to over-protect them. Researchers have shown that by sheltering our children too much, they fail to develop “proprioceptive sense” (ie. muscle and joint control) and even a simple game such as tag can ironically become dangerous because the children lack the basic skills to “play gently.” Some schools have even started banning tag games because the kids are reportedly unable to self-regulate and are unintentionally seriously injuring each other, according to occupational therapist Angela Hanscom. These children have not been given a chance to develop the risk assessment skills that Stacy’s young sons are already learning. This can lead them to not only have a stunted ability to assess and manage risks, but to lack resiliency, defined by Angela Lee Duckworth as “having a positive response to failure or adversity.”

It is so important we give our children opportunities to assess risk for themselves to develop personal resilience and avoid potential later mental health problems. Hospitals are observing now that fewer children are going to A&E with broken arms and legs, but so many more are now on waiting lists for mental health support. Perhaps there is a correlation?

Could more access to natural outdoor play reduce the need for teachers to use restorative practices in school? Before I answer this question, I must stress that I am very positive about the use of restorative practice in schools!

Anyway, back to answer the question, quite possibly yes! This is for the simple reason that the vast majority of the time, children seek their own resolution and friendship restoration when given freedom and time from adult intervention in their natural outdoor play environment.

I have seen this in our own OWLS after-school club where most of the children are able to learn how to sort out their own conflicts in an appropriate way. The give and take, negotiation, turn taking elements.

Of course, the difficulties arise in supporting children who struggle to learn the social nuances that abound in our everyday interactions with others and who find these human interactions mind-bogglingly complicated! It is these children (so often on the autistic spectrum) that need our help to learn these social skills while they play.