When my son was in kindergarten, I’d walk over to his school once a week to read his class a story. It was a blast. Each time, I’d finish the story and pose a question: “What did the pigeon really want to do?” Of a class of 25 students, guess how many hands shot up to answer? Nearly all of them—even if their answers were outlandish: “I once saw a bird in my backyard!” “My grandma says pigeons are like rats.” “I had peanut butter and jelly for lunch!”
Though their answers were all over the place, I was amazed by their desire to engage and share. Then, I reflected on my experience teaching high schoolers. Even if those angsty teens knew the answer, they’d treat me like a T-Rex in Jurassic Park: Avoid eye contact! Stay perfectly still and maybe Mr. Mielke won’t call on you.
In just a handful of years, the practice of hand raising drops drastically. Why? As students mature, the stakes feel higher—grades matter, peer judgment intensifies, and wrong answers seem to carry real social consequences.
Often, students’ reluctance hinges more on how they feel than what they know. I see this play out even with adults. When I lead workshops, after teachers discuss ideas in groups or pairs, I typically prompt: “Raise your hand if you came up with an idea.” Usually 90 percent do. Then I say, “Keep your hand up if you’d be willing to share.” Almost instantly, all but a few hands drop. It’s the visible admission of “I have an idea, a question, or an answer—but I don’t want to share it in front of others.” This reluctance reveals something important about classroom dynamics.
Balancing Comfort and Growth
If we want more participation and engagement among our students, we need to create the social conditions for them to move from feeling fearful of social friction, criticism, or embarrassment to feeling safe and confident.
Herein lies the challenge: If we don’t push students out of their comfort zones, they won’t have opportunities to stretch and grow. However, if we push them too far out of their comfort zones, they might become overwhelmed, especially if they aren’t successful. What we need is a Goldilocks approach to fostering psychological safety—a healthy middle ground. To achieve this, we must build students’ learning experiences around gradient.
Gradient is the level of social pressure students feel—the perceived risk to their reputation if they make a mistake in front of others. If I slip up, how much damage will it cause—a minor dip in reputation that I can resurface from? Or a paralyzing plunge that drowns my feelings of confidence and safety?
We can think of gradient on a continuum:
On one end, we have low gradient experiences. These typically involve all of the following:
- Staying out of the spotlight
- Participating in limited or brief social interactions
- Taking on cognitive tasks that are easy
- Engaging in content that is safe (e.g., not sharing opinions, past experiences, emotions)
On the other end are high gradient experiences. Here, students are doing anyone of the following:
- Staying in the spotlight
- Interacting with a large group
- Taking on cognitively challenging tasks
- Sharing something vulnerable or personal (e.g., opinions, past experiences, emotions)
For an experience to be considered low gradient, we need all of the factors listed. Yet to be considered high gradient, we need just one factor listed. For instance, asking students to debate a controversial topic in small groups (vulnerable content) makes it high gradient, even if the cognitive load is light. The less secure students feel, the less they want to engage in high gradient situations.
Our goal as educators is two-fold: (1) Facilitate a large quantity of brief, low gradient interactions to build psychological safety, and (2) Use medium gradient experiences to ease students into quality high gradient interactions.
The key to this progression lies in medium gradient (or “Goldilocks”) interactions—yet these are typically the ones missing from most classrooms. Such interactions push learners just enough out of their comfort zone to succeed. For example, students might jump into a quick table talk or participate in short 30-second interactions with a peer before being asked to share in front of the class. (Figure 1 illustrates how to structure interactions across all three levels.)
This brings us back to the raised hand: Unless we’ve built psychological safety—reducing perceived risk—learners will keep their hands down.
Fortunately, teachers don’t need a fancy curriculum to achieve this—just proactive and consistent prompting of low and medium gradient interactions that encourage risk taking. After all, we can’t expect students to leap across the gradient without a strong footing.
