Nursery World - Risky business

Learning is a tricky process, because in order to make progress, we must be willing to take risks, says Sue Cowley.

It would be possible to avoid failure, by being very cautious, but life would be very dull indeed if we never did anything challenging. As we grow up, we start to worry about ‘getting it wrong’. Young children don’t really understand the concept of ‘failure’, though – it is an idea that adults pass on to them. Children might get frustrated when things don’t go as they want, but if they fail, they dust themselves down and have another go.

It is tempting for practitioners to jump in and help the children. We say, ‘If you just do it like this…’ or ‘Let me help you with that…’ This is, in part, what teaching is about, but we need to be careful not to cut all the failure out of the equation. People often learn more from their mistakes than they do from their successes. It is important to allow children to get it wrong, so that they can learn how to get it right in the end.

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