This paper investigates recent trends and practical approaches to psychological safety in organizational contexts. Defined as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, psychological safety is crucial for fostering learning, performance, and innovation, especially amid growing uncertainty and diversity. The paper examines challenges in remote and hybrid work environments and presents adaptive strategies for sustaining psychological safety. It also introduces Japan-specific practices, including Ryosuke Ishii’s four-factor model and the concept of psychological flexibility. Measurement approaches such as validated surveys and qualitative assessments are discussed. The importance of leadership in balancing high-performance expectations with open communication is emphasized. Psychological safety is not about being agreeable, but about enabling candid dialogue, constructive feedback, and learning from failure. Ultimately, it is positioned as a long-term cultural foundation essential for organizational resilience, well-being, and inclusive innovation.

The author’s current research theme is “How to foster autonomous learners”. Here, an autonomous learner is defined as “a learner who continues to learn because they find learning interesting due to intrinsic motivation”. The author believes that intrinsic motivation is related to how one deals with one’s emotions, and that this is related to a sense of “security” within oneself. Based on this belief, the author has created a model and is putting it into practice. This article explains the details of this model and the effects of practice.

The Double Triangle Diagram (DTD) is a novel and integrated visualization method to represent proportional relationships in multiplication and division word problems. The DTD illustrates the proportional relationships between two quantities by incorporating six possible operations: multiplications and divisions involving two existential quantities and two relational quantities. This study investigated its application in a classroom setting with fifth-grade students in elementary school. Through pre-tests, post-tests, and delayed retention tests, the study found that students achieved a deeper understanding of relational quantities in multiplication and division problems. The results suggest that the DTD effectively aids students in visualizing and understanding complex relationships between quantities. Teachers also assessed the approach as both practical and highly beneficial for elementary education. Future studies are recommended to expand this research across different grade levels and educational contexts to further validate the diagram’s effectiveness and explore its potential to enhance mathematical reasoning skills longitudinally.

The importance of trial-and-error modifications during concept mapping has been highlighted, but such modification activities have been difficult to analyze systematically due to learners’ freedom in creating nodes and links. This study analyzed three datasets of university students using the recomposition concept map, where learners recompose maps using only teacher-provided components, to investigate how modification activities impact the map score (an indicator of map quality). A multiple regression analysis revealed that the number of false propositions created and proposition changes had a significant and strong impact on the map score. Analysis comparing high and low-scoring groups revealed no differences in modification frequency and precision of targeting false propositions, but found differences in the success rate of correcting false propositions and the recall of such propositions. These findings show that modification activities affect the map score and suggest the importance of supporting proposition modification for low-scoring learners.