When Students Are Afraid to Be Wrong

Confidence, risk and the hidden barrier to real learning.

Author introduction

Elizabeth Giles taught English in NSW public high schools for 25 years and served as both Head Teacher Literacy & Learning Support and Head Teacher Curriculum in the NSW public education system. She now works in learning design and vocational education as a Trainer and Assessor in Leadership and Management. Elizabeth writes about teaching, professional learning, educational innovation and the future of schooling.

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In a previous post I reflected on why teachers sometimes resist new ideas in professional learning. The experience made me think about a parallel problem in classrooms.

Students can be just as resistant to learning — not because they are lazy, but because learning involves risk.

If a student leaves school with only one capability, what should it be?

For me, the answer is confidence. Not the confidence that comes from being the best in the class or collecting the highest mark, but the confidence to attempt something difficult, fail, and try again. The confidence to ask questions and go looking for answers.

Without that kind of confidence, learning becomes an exercise in avoiding mistakes rather than discovering new ideas.

Ironically, confidence is the one thing school takes away from so many students.

I say that not just as a teacher, but as a former student. I was a high-potential student in a selective school and I remember the constant pressure to be correct. Learning became stressful rather than enjoyable. Every answer felt like it had to be right the first time.

The same fear shows up in classrooms all the time: the terror of being wrong.

I often tell my students, “If you’re not getting things wrong, you’re not learning. You already know it.”

Psychologist Albert Bandura described this dynamic in his work on self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997). Students who believe they are capable of succeeding are far more willing to attempt challenging tasks. Students who doubt their ability often avoid those situations altogether, preferring tasks where failure is less visible.

Students naturally gravitate towards their comfort zones. The challenge for teachers is getting them out of that space and into what psychologists call the zone of proximal development — the point where a task is just difficult enough for learning to occur.

Confidence grows there, but only if students feel safe enough to risk being wrong.

Learning researchers sometimes describe this space as productive struggle. Studies by education researcher Manu Kapur show that students who attempt challenging problems before receiving explicit instruction often develop deeper conceptual understanding than students who are shown the solution immediately (Kapur, 2016).

At a time when explicit teaching is receiving renewed attention in education debates, Kapur’s work raises an important question: what exactly are we aiming for? Immediate performance on an assessment task, or the deeper conceptual understanding that allows students to apply knowledge to new situations?

That isn’t an argument against explicit teaching. It has an important place in effective instruction. But it cannot be the whole story.

That tension between performance and understanding becomes very visible in senior classrooms.

In senior English a pattern becomes very clear when you’ve seen the system from both sides — first as a teacher, and later as an HSC marker. Many students aren’t really trying to think their way through a question. What they want is the correct answer in advance so they can memorise a version of it and adapt it to whatever question appears in the exam.

The response can look sophisticated on the surface, but it isn’t authentic thinking. It’s strategic reproduction.

There are a couple of possible explanations. One is that the expectations of senior courses may push beyond what many students feel capable of attempting independently. The other possibility is more uncomfortable: students may be so afraid of failure that regurgitated answers feel safer than thinking for themselves. The race to be number one in cohort rankings means failure is out of the question.

Students labelled “high potential” can lose confidence quickly when they encounter something they can't immediately master. They’re used to success and often haven’t had much practice persisting through difficulty.

Meanwhile students who have had to work for their academic success often develop a kind of quiet persistence. They’re used to things not coming easily, so they’re less afraid of the struggle that learning sometimes requires. These students often surpass the ones who started ahead.

Psychologist Carol Dweck describes this difference as the contrast between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006). Students who see intelligence as fixed tend to avoid challenges that might expose weakness, while students who believe ability develops through effort are far more willing to attempt difficult tasks and persist when they fail.

Teachers see the behavioural signs of lost confidence constantly. Students hesitate to begin writing until the teacher confirms their idea is correct. They ask repeatedly if their answer is right before continuing. They abandon tasks quickly when they can’t see an immediate solution. Some disengage completely, deciding they’re simply “not good at school.” Others disrupt the class so no one can work, ensuring their own lack of understanding is less visible.

Psychologist Martin Seligman described similar patterns in his research on learned helplessness (Seligman, 1975). When learners repeatedly experience difficulty without success, they may begin to believe that effort makes little difference. Over time this leads to avoidance, disengagement and a reluctance to attempt challenging work — behaviours teachers recognise immediately.

None of those behaviours are really about laziness.

They’re about confidence.

And for many students that confidence, or lack of it, begins with reading.

Reading is one of the earliest places where that confidence forms or fractures. A student who struggles to read fluently quickly begins to assume they are not intelligent. A fluent reader, on the other hand, suddenly has access to knowledge, stories and ideas that others find harder to reach.

I remember learning to read myself. The stories were almost absurdly simple: “Dick can run. See Dick run. Tim can run too.” There wasn’t much plot.

But the excitement didn’t come from the story. It came from getting better. I remember reading those sentences over and over, enjoying the feeling of becoming faster and more fluent. I collected sight-word cards like they were precious gems I’d earned — tokens on my journey through the game of learning to read.

Those early experiences of success matter enormously.

Large international studies reinforce this connection. Data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment shows that students with strong reading proficiency demonstrate higher levels of academic confidence and independence across subjects (OECD, 2019). Literacy does not simply support academic achievement; it shapes how capable students believe themselves to be as learners.

The same principle — confidence built through improvement — appeared in a completely different context years later.

I led a cross-curricular Year 7 team where a staff shortage meant I ended up teaching French for a term. I told the class the truth on the first day.

“I’m not very good at French,” I said. “I don’t memorise information easily and my pronunciation isn’t great.”

But that wasn’t going to stop us improving.

We learned pronunciation from French speakers on YouTube. We practised Duolingo for fifteen minutes each day. We repeated quizzes to see if we could better our scores. Some students competed against each other, and some against themselves. Students went from 0 to 10/10 in a day, many taking up the challenge as a game at home.

Many of them weren’t naturally good rote learners either. None of us expected to become fluent in a term, but we knew something important: if we kept practising, we would get better.

And we did.

When the goal shifts from being the best student in the room to simply being better than you were yesterday, something important happens.

Learning changes. Progress becomes visible. Improvement becomes something students can chase.

In other words, learning becomes gamified — and there is nothing wrong with that.

Games work because they reward progress rather than perfection. Players expect to fail repeatedly before they succeed, and each failed attempt provides information for the next one.

Learning works the same way.

Schools will always need structure, curriculum and explicit teaching. But learning also requires something less tangible: the confidence to risk being wrong.

Which raises a question worth asking.

If the goal of schooling isn’t simply producing correct answers, but developing confident learners, are we creating classrooms where students feel safe enough to take the risks that real learning requires?

In a future post I’ll explore another piece of this puzzle: how our grading culture may unintentionally discourage the kind of learning risks students need to grow.

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What do you think matters most for students leaving school today — knowledge, skills, confidence, curiosity, or something else entirely?