Risk Taking

This year, both my students and I engaged in the act of taking risks and learning from the fallout. As Ronald A. Beghetto (2018) writes, there exists an immense opportunity for learning and growth in taking risks in the classroom. Beghetto suggests taking risks by rethinking success, honoring failures, and thinking about the possibilities for change (2018). This year, I took risks in order to learn how to be an effective and strong educator. I had to learn how to accept failures along the way and learn from them to create generative experiences from which I could learn. This was not an easy process, especially given my tendencies of perfectionism and self criticism, but my cooperating teacher was a supportive guide that showed me how to create opportunity out of missteps. For instance, one of the first assignments that I made for students resulted in a lot of confusion and difficulty for students: the directions were unclear and the language of the questions was convoluted and indirect. My cooperating teacher and I then walked through the assignment together and discussed why it didn't work; from then on, I felt more comfortable taking risks in my teaching and my lesson planning as long as it was paired with critical reflection. This year, I learned the immense value of reflection and risk-taking.

While taking risks myself, I also encouraged students to take risks in their work. Because much of the analytical work we were doing was complex and new to students, I openly encouraged students to try their best; I told them the work was going to be uncomfortable and confusing at first, but that in taking a risk and putting thought into their work, they would gradually grow more comfortable and confident. Along the way, I could see that students built more confidence and authority in their work; they were not hesitant to ask questions and were learning how to push their analysis of text further in order to build discussion and challenge ideas.

Another area of risk that we pursued in class was creative work. Each week, students had one class period to work on personal creative projects, whether it was writing, journaling, or building a world in Minecraft. However, during our poetry unit, we began weekly creative challenges. During these weekly challenges, students were given a prompt and asked to write a poem. The first creative challenge, shown below, asked students to visit Window-swap.com and write a Haiku poem based on whatever window view drew their attention. Because we had only practiced structured analytical writing together in class, students approached this challenge with hesitancy. I introduced the challenge to them by emphasizing the power of taking risks with creative work: this was their space to create work and express themselves through creation of a poetic world. As seen below, there were a variety of approaches to the challenge: some students focused on using vivid imagery to describe their view while others created a story based on the view. In sharing these poems with the class, I made sure to once again emphasize the beauty that originated from the willingness to challenge ourselves and take a risk with our writing. I believe creativity is a vehicle for building confidence and manifesting opportunities to make change and grow, and I intend to continue using creative work to push students further in their learning.