Our brains and nervous systems work closely together to monitor our environment for signs of threats or danger as an innate survival instinct. For our ancestors millennia ago, these instincts made a life-and-death difference. Our classrooms may not have life-threatening predators, but students’ survival instincts remain active within our students every time they step through our doors.
Students’ primary instinct is to seek safety. Dr. Gabor Maté, a renowned physician and author specializing in trauma, stress, and child development, says, "Safety is not just a question of a lack of threat; safety is the presence of connection.” While these ideas also apply to adults, this article focuses on students' connections to teaching practices.
Understanding Psychological Safety
The amygdala, where our brain processes emotion, particularly in response to fear and threat, interacts with the hippocampus, which is responsible for forming and storing memories. Together, they keep us safe. When the amygdala senses a threat, it triggers the “fight or flight” response, and the hippocampus creates a strong memory of the event, helping us recognize and respond to similar threats in the future.
Dr. Stephen Porges coined the term “neuroception” to describe our continuous automatic instinct to scan our environment, both inside and out, to determine whether we are safe. Students' neuroception is heightened at the start of the school year as they are placed in new environments. When everything is unfamiliar, even the most confident students experience a state of heightened vigilance.
Research shows that the amygdala continues to activate until their safety needs are met. Students with positive past experiences will remain vigilant until their expectations of those good experiences are confirmed. Students with negative past experiences expect more of the same and withhold trust until we convince them otherwise.
Transient international schools with diverse, multilingual, multicultural student bodies face unique challenges in creating safe spaces. How can we, as educators, overcome these challenges and create environments that nurture safety and belonging? With so many students entering our classrooms from far and wide every year, how do we make it happen when we don’t know what experiences our students come to us with or what safety means to them?
As a sage African proverb aptly reminds us, "A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." Poor connections with adults, inconsistent expectations, negative or weak peer interactions, fear of judgment, cluttered or overcrowded environments, and stressors outside the classroom are some things that diminish the sense of psychological safety. In a state of hypervigilance or mistrust, students will lock into a fight-or-flight response that manifests as disengagement, acting out, or avoidance. Interpreting these behaviors as instinctive survival strategies and using the information they give us to create less challenging environments will alleviate the root causes of friction and ultimately create a greater sense of safety for all.
Learning From Indigenous Communities
Indigenous communities offer valuable insights into embedding psychological safety into daily life. The San people, for example- the oldest inhabitants of Southern Africa, had no formal authority but governed themselves through communal decision-making. Oral storytelling was their learning tool for passing essential life skills from one generation to the next. Their belief in interconnectedness negated the concept of “me.” Instead, they shared everything they had with each other. We can also learn from the Quechua people from the Andean highlands, who formed work groups to organize shared labor to grow food collaboratively and passed that tradition down through generations. The Haudenosaunee’s governance structures inspired the formation of the United States government today.
These communities thrived by maintaining routines (passing on traditions) and embedding connection, collaboration, and shared decision-making and responsibilities into every aspect of their lives.
So, how can we reconstruct these intuitive principles, which have helped people thrive for centuries, into our learning spaces?
Building Blocks of Safe Learning Environments
By incorporating predictability, communal decision-making, and regularly visited routines, we can create environments where students feel secure and supported. Research shows that predictable routines reduce the cognitive load and redirect the brain's energy to learning. A strong sense of trust and belonging reduces anxiety and makes space for learning, risk-taking, critical thinking, and communication.
The work begins with prioritizing our emotional regulation and psychological safety. We can then use that grounding to model and support the behaviors of our students. Planning how we want our learning spaces to function before students come in is key.
Limited planning time is a constant challenge, but we can save much of that precious time by leaning on each other. The website Life Skills, aligned to the Multi System Tiers of Support (MTSS), is a resource to be bookmarked! Created by teachers, the site has free, year-long, customizable resources for integrating social-emotional learning that can be implemented as is or customized. It also includes resources on integrating academic and life skills with handy examples that could be copied and customized to any class setting and much more!
Templates for teacher-facing docs (see My Class Procedures in the grey section) and student-facing Google slide templates are particularly handy to support pre-planning. Things change as we get to know students, and flexibility is key, but clarity about how we want the flow of the space to work reduces those inconsistencies that spark student anxiety. You can check out my example of instructional time allocation and routines and procedures through this link.
Building a positive class community through co-creating norms and collaborative decision-making from day one is key. Resources like Responsive Classrooms' First Six Weeks lay out the process step by step so that all the planning is done for you. Involving students in creating class agreements and establishing norms that support mutual respect helps them be invested in following through and gives them the sense of community they need.
Embedding regular explicit instruction and reminders about co-created routines helps make the procedures second nature, leaving more space for learning. Ever heard of “Show me your calendar, and I’ll show you your priorities?” That also applies to routines and procedures, which need slivers of instructional time between those standards and unit objectives throughout the year.
In the long run, prioritizing psychological safety instructional practices and making time for explicit instruction will improve student well-being and, ultimately, the health of the whole school community. Reflecting on our practices, creating spaces where every student feels safe, valued, and ready to learn is a significant commitment, but the rewards are priceless.
Donica Merhazion is a middle school educator at the International School of Kenya with extensive experience in special education, specializing in Orton-Gillingham instruction and inclusive practices that address diverse learning needs. Her expertise includes implementing Responsive Classroom strategies and blended learning to create dynamic, student-centered environments. She is committed to differentiated instruction that prioritizes individual strengths and challenges, fostering self-worth and confidence while addressing the unique needs of students with disabilities. By designing equitable, inquiry-driven learning experiences, she equips learners with critical thinking skills and resilience, empowering them to overcome barriers and thrive as lifelong learners.
