Can we teach courage?

The recent Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast miniseries offers a rich seam of insight for educators. Though ostensibly about spontaneous speaking in high-stakes professions—negotiation, broadcasting, refereeing—it invites us to reconsider the nature of talk in the classroom—not as a peripheral skill or passing distraction, but as a central pillar of how learning happens.

What emerges from the series is a truth both obvious and counterintuitive: spontaneous speaking is not the antithesis of preparation, but its culmination. The ability to respond thoughtfully in the moment—to speak before one is entirely certain, to listen deeply, to adjust mid-flight—is a skill that grows out of deep rehearsal, structured thinking, and intentional practice.

It is also, I would argue, at the heart of great teaching.

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Thinking allowed

There’s a curious paradox in teaching: the more we plan, the more nimble we become. Lesson plans, like chess openings, may anticipate several moves ahead, but the beauty—and indeed the effectiveness—of a great classroom lies in its responsiveness. Teachers don’t simply execute lessons—they attend to the moment, adjusting as learning unfolds, sometimes clumsily, other times gloriously.

This is where coaching offers a compelling parallel. Myles Downey writes that “coaching is the art of facilitating the performance, learning and development of another.” That facilitation isn’t about smoothing the path—it’s about creating conditions for challenge, stretch, and discovery. So too in teaching: our role is not to rescue students from the discomfort of speaking out, but to help them sit with it, work through it, and find their voice on the other side.

And yet—how often do we give students this space?

There’s a temptation in many schools to cordon off oracy as a ‘soft skill’—relegated to PSHE lesson or debated in the safety of a co-curricular club. But spontaneous speaking is where thinking meets the world, where ideas that previously made sense in one’s head encounter the merciless threshing of reality. It is real-time cognition, exposed.

To foster this, teachers embrace a kind of disciplined improvisation—holding structures lightly, resisting the urge to dominate dialogue, and instead coaching students into fuller ownership of their thinking.

This is not to suggest that spontaneity thrives in a vacuum. As Peps Mccrea reminds us in his work on learning design, participation flourishes when thinking is scaffolded. Strategies like Think–Pair–Share slow the tempo of talk just enough to allow ideas to settle before they are spoken aloud. These deliberate practices do more than encourage participation—they build the intellectual confidence that makes dialogue possible.

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Speaking before you’re ready

Chris Voss, the former FBI negotiator featured in the podcast, notes that overthinkers “make mistakes at the same rate” as impulsive actors—only more slowly. The problem then isn’t thinking; it’s rumination. In the classroom, we see this in the perfectionist who rewrites a single sentence five times, or the pupil who never raises a hand until their thoughts are perfectly formed. These students aren’t disengaged—they’re paralysed by the pursuit of perfection.

To help them flourish, classrooms become places where “failure” is rebranded as rehearsal. Where the risk of being wrong is recast as the route to being right.

To teach students to think well is to teach them to speak well—not slickly, but authentically, reflectively, and with clarity of thought.

As Geoff Barton and the Oracy Commission highlight, spoken language is not ornamental—it is foundational. It underpins cognition, relationships, leadership and learning. Yet our classrooms, like our boardrooms, too often favour the rapid, the fluent, the confident. We praise polish over presence, answers over inquiry, speed over space.

This is more than a matter of technique. It is a matter of culture. Martin Robinson calls for the return of dialectic—the revival of structured dialogue as a means not simply to share opinions but to pursue truth together. Dialogue, in this sense, is not a classroom tactic. It is an intellectual ethic that demands that we cultivate not just the voice of the individual, but the virtues of patience, attentiveness, humility. It is here that the classroom becomes what Robinson calls a “gymnasium of the mind,” where rhetorical flourish gives way to thoughtful engagement, and students learn that speaking is not about performance, but about presence.

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(En)Courage

Can we teach courage? Perhaps not in the heroic sense. But we can create the conditions in which it might be found.

To speak spontaneously in a classroom is no small feat. It requires courage—the kind of courage that must be gently, persistently encouraged:

• The courage to speak before one is entirely ready.
• The courage to listen and truly hear.
• The courage to change one’s mind.
• And perhaps most importantly—the courage to believe that what one says, even imperfectly, matters.

This kind of courage is not innate. It is cultivated. And it flourishes best in classrooms where thinking aloud is not penalised, but prized; and where silence is not feared, but framed as fertile ground.

This, too, is where coaching offers wisdom. Julie Starr calls it “staying with the silence”—holding space while someone else finds their words. Andy Buck describes this as “letting silence do the heavy lifting.” What these insights share is the belief that silence is not the absence of learning, but its crucible. In such spaces, courage takes root.

References and Further Reading

Abrahams, M. (2023). Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Barton, G., MacAllister, H., & Ferguson, C. (2024). We Need to Talk: The Case for Oracy in Schools. Oracy Commission. [Online] Available at: https://oracy.org.uk/we-need-to-talk

Buck, A. (2019). The BASIC Coaching Method: Questions for Coaching Teachers and Leaders. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational.

Downey, M. (2014). Effective Modern Coaching: The Principles and Art of Successful Business Coaching. London: LID Publishing.

McCrea, P. (2020). Motivated Teaching: Harnessing the Science of Motivation to Boost Attention and Effort in the Classroom. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational.

McCrea, P. (2023). Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice. Woodbridge: John Catt Educational.

Robinson, M. (2013). Trivium 21c: Preparing Young People for the Future with Lessons from the Past. Woodbridge: Independent Thinking Press.

Starr, J. (2021). The Coaching Manual: The Definitive Guide to The Process, Principles and Skills of Personal Coaching (5th ed.). Harlow: Pearson Education.

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“We speak not only to tell others what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”
— Oliver Sacks

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