The Right Kind of Wrong at Brookwood
I spent a few days last week at the NAIS Annual Conference, sitting in sessions spanning school culture, learning science, and the accelerating role of AI in education. The speakers were researchers, school leaders, and practitioners from across the country. And somewhere around the second day, I noticed something: I kept hearing things that sounded familiar.
One session drew on Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety, the finding that communities where people feel safe enough to fail openly outperform those that don't. For anyone working in design thinking and changemaking, this is foundational. Iteration assumes failure. Prototyping assumes you'll get it wrong before you get it right. The whole model depends on students who are willing to try something, watch it not work, and try again.
Which is what made one data point from that session so worth sitting with. At a school with a genuinely strong growth mindset culture, 96% of students said their teachers encourage risk-taking. And yet only a third said they personally feel motivated when they make mistakes. The explanation students gave was consistent: the academic track feels too steep, the stakes too high, the cost of stumbling too real. Whatever the adults were saying about failure being valuable, students were doing the math and reaching a different conclusion.
A student who genuinely believes the cost of failure is too high will struggle to do real changemaking work. Identifying a genuine problem, designing a response, testing it, and refining it requires exactly the tolerance for uncertainty and setback that the data says many students quietly lack.
This is the thread we're pulling on in our changemaking program. The philosophy at Brookwood, rooted in The New Face of Rigor, has always held that how kids feel determines whether kids learn. The question we have to keep asking is what our students actually believe, in practice, when something goes wrong.
David Saunders
Director of Technology, Changemaking, & Leadership
