Risk in Education

Messages to students and teachers are often packaged, understandably, for dissimilar audiences. Instead of stratifying the needs and interests of students and teachers, I’d like to work toward unifying them- focusing on the mindsets and enterprises that we share. Salient among these emphases is the potential of risk-taking as a means of eclipsing the status quo and yielding favorable outcomes for students. The essential stages of human growth are the byproducts of calculated risks. Learning to swim or ride a bike, asking someone for his or her hand in marriage, heading to that job interview- these risks are the signposts of our lives.

Educators inhabit the top 10% of America’s educational attainment pyramid. We are experts, lifelong learners who spend our days straddling not only the realms of education, but also those of sociology, psychology, and politics. And if we demand treatment as experts, we should have the pride, confidence, and fortitude to act as academic pioneers whose chief function rests in the pursuit of progress.

In school, this progress is stifled when we mediate risk to the point where teachers are reluctant- even fearful- to deviate, experiment, pivot, or move beyond comfort zones. The easiest means of disassociating oneself with failure is to play it safe: assign lessons that fail to stretch student thinking; seek confirmation for biases, perform instructional triage in the face of standardized tests, and make fewer waves in the classroom, department, school, and district. But if we don’t make the waves, someone else will.

When we’re faced with obvious success, we fixate on the results. Looking at Michelangelo’s sculptures, we marvel at the realism of his figures and the slick finish of his Carrara marble. Yet the bulk of his work involved the elimination of stone that did not serve his vision of final form. Each movement of his mallets and chisels held substantial risk. In education, we’re not mass-producing die-cast learning experiences, we’re collaborating on enterprises to reveal something new, to pursue possibility. And teachers shouldn’t serve solely as benefactors or critics of their students’ work; they should be wielding a chisel of their own.

In baseball, a coach’s decision to attempt to steal a base has been proven mathematically unfavorable and not worth the risk of an out. But one doesn’t have to watch too many innings to witness base-stealing attempts. On the diamond, it’s the pursuit of the unknown and the urge to eclipse expectation that fuels this otherwise irrational decision-making. Off the diamond, the stakes are higher for students, whose lives can be quietly compromised by the status quo, an abstract concept that inflates fear and punctuates the potential for failure. As any problem solver might tell you, failures from meaningful risks represent footsteps toward innovative solutions or means of reframing entire systems. If educators and students choose to stagnate under the pressures of standardization and accountability, we’ll be stuck on first base indefinitely. If teachers and students want advancement, we have to take it, and this will involve risk. -TK