The Courage to Learn | Language Magazine

Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and James Marshall explain how to communicate success criteria to motivate multilingual learners

Learning is hard. In fact, there is compelling evidence that exerting mental effort feels aversive. In a meta-analytic review of 170 studies that included 358 different tasks and 4,670 unique participants, the researchers found a “strong positive associa- tion between mental effort and negative affect” (David et al., 2024, p. 1070). At the end of their study, the researchers ask an interesting question: If mental effort is consistently unpleasant, why do people still voluntarily pursue mentally effortful activities? (p. 1091). The researchers do not answer this question, but we will venture a guess: experiencing success. Success is motivational and reinforcing. When we experience success, we are much more likely to want that success again. Thus, we engage in the actions or behaviors that led to our success.

In fact, our brains get reinforced when we experience success. The reward pathway receives a shot of dopamine when we are successful, and it feels good. But, perhaps even more importantly, “dopamine release not only occurs during rewarding experiences but also in anticipation of them” (Guy- Evans, 2023). It may be that students are willing to exert mental effort, even though it feels aversive, when they expect to be successful and when they are successful. With regular experiences of success, students come to expect success and see mistakes and errors as speedbumps—temporary, transient, and nothing to worry about.

The opposite is also true. When students experience failure, they come to expect failure and they are much more likely give up. After all, why exert mental effort, which we know is aversive in and of itself, when the outcome is failure and there is no dopamine shot waiting at the end of the experience?

The Success–Failure Ratio

What we’ve described is known as the success–failure ratio. Each of us has a success–failure ratio that influences each of our academic pursuits. As Wilson et al. (2020) noted, optimal learning occurs when we are successful, on average, 85% of the time.

Consider our multilingual learners and their success–failure ratios. The question you are probably asking yourself is this: How can I increase students’ opportunities for success? It’s an important question because students who regularly experience success are much more motivated and actually learn more (Urhahne and Wijnia, 2023).

One important way to ensure that students regularly experience success is to define success. This involves teachers sharing what successful learning looks like. These are often called success criteria and provide students with an anticipation of what success will look like. Typically, teachers have one success criterion per lesson. The result: Students may wait an hour or more to experience success or even know they’re on the right track. AI systems can be asked to segment the success criterion into parts such that there are four to six contributing success criteria, all based on the original one supplied to the chatbot. In that way, students have multiple opportunities to experience incremental, iterative success on the way to the ultimate outcome. And with knowledge gained from the contributing success criteria, when a student is not successful, teachers have the information they need to rapidly adjust the lesson earlier to ensure students are successful next time.

For example, a teacher had the following success criteria: I can use regular past-tense verbs to describe a personal experience orally. When asked, ChatGPT suggested the following:

• I can recognize regular past-tense verbs and say them with the correct ending.
• I can change a regular verb from present to past tense when I speak.
• I can talk about what I did using regular past-tense verbs in the right order.
• I can tell a short story about something I did, using regular past- tense verbs clearly.

Of course, the teacher needs to consider each of these, revising and exacting as necessary using their professional judgement. But more discrete success criteria allow teachers to chunk lessons, collect evidence of student learning, and scaffold learning experiences. Instead of overwhelming learners with too much content at once, chunking allows teachers to focus on one concept or skill at a time, making it easier to process and retain information. This approach aligns with how the brain naturally organizes and stores knowledge, improving cognitive load management and facilitating deeper learning (Sweller, 1998). Chunking is especially important for English learners and younger students, as it creates clear, focused opportunities to practice language and build confidence step by step.

Success Leads to Courage

When students experience success, which can be structured and supported by their teachers, they are also more likely to develop the courage to learn. In the research world, this is known as academic risk-taking, which refers to a student’s willingness to engage in challenging learning tasks even when there’s a possibility of making mistakes or being wrong (Clifford, 1988). It includes behaviors such as asking questions, sharing answers in front of peers, trying new strategies, or attempting complex problems without fear of failure or judgment. Academic risk-taking is essential for deep learning because it encourages exploration, resilience, and the development of critical thinking. When students feel safe to take risks, they are more likely to stretch their thinking, learn from feedback, and grow both academically and socially (Fisher et al., 2025).

The courage to learn is fostered in classrooms that have high levels of psychological safety and relational trust. It’s exhibited when the task is challenging enough to be of perceived value but not beyond the students’ self-efficacy beliefs about what they can accomplish. And, to return to an earlier topic in this article, it is influenced by students’ personal histories of success. Interestingly, there is also a social aspect to academic risk-taking and the courage to learn. In some classrooms, students see their peers engaged in challenging tasks and accept the challenge. This requires that teachers model accepting challenges, structure the learning experiences so that students are prepared for the challenge, and then highlight the successes that students have as they complete the learning tasks.

In five experiments on the social contagion of challenge-seeking, the researchers noted, “while the participants generally avoided challenging word problems, observing challenge-seeking in others increased the probability of participants choosing more challenging options” (Ogulmus et al., 2024, p. 2573). As we noted before, learning is hard and is often an adverse experience. But this series of studies suggests that students are more likely to choose challenging tasks when they see others doing so. Thus, the courage to learn is, at least in part, socially mediated. Implications for Multilingual Learners

Much of what we have shared in this article applies to all students. But let us take a moment to focus on multilingual learners. Sadly, many of our students who are developing multiple literacies have experienced failure and ridicule. That must change if they are to grow and develop. Their teachers need to structure learning experiences, and clearly communicate success criteria, to impact and raise students’ success–failure ratios in much more positive ways. This requires more careful chunking of content and the systematic use, and fading, of scaffolds. In addition, we should focus our attention on teaching the behaviors of academic risk-taking, creating safe learning environments for students to move from risk-adverse to robust. When students develop the courage to learn, they ask questions and share their ideas. In doing so, they bring their full selves to the classroom, feeling safe and secure in their learning and growing in their linguistic prowess.

References

David, L., Vassena, E., and Bijleveld, E. (2024). “The Unpleas- antness of Thinking: A meta-analytic review of the association between mental effort and negative affect.” Psychological Bulletin, 150(9), 1070–1093. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000443

• Clifford, M. M. (1988). “Failure Tolerance and Academic Risk-Tak- ing in Ten- to Twelve-Year-Old Students.” British Journal of Educational Psychology, 58, 15–27.
• Fisher, D., Frey, N., and Marshall, J. (2025). The Courage to Learn: Building Risk-Ready Classrooms Where Students Thrive. Corwin.
• Guy-Evans, O. (2023). “Brain Reward Systems.” Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/brain-reward-system.html
• Ogulmus, C., Lee, Y., Chakrabarti, B., and Murayama, K. (2024). “Social Contagion of Challenge-Seeking Behavior.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(10), 2573–2587. https:// doi.org/10.1037/xge0001620
• Sweller, J. (1988). “Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on learning.” Cognitive Science, 12, 257–285.
• Urhahne, D., and Wijnia, L. (2023). “Theories of Motivation in Edu- cation: An integrative framework.” Educational Psychology Review,

35(45). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09767-9