On taking beautiful risks

by | Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Dr. Ronald Beghetto, Professor of Educational Psychology in the Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut, is an internationally recognized expert on creative thought and action in educational settings. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the editor-in-chief for the Journal of Creative Behavior (the oldest and longest standing journal devoted to creativity research), and creativity advisor for Lego Foundation. His research focuses on promoting creativity in everyday teaching, learning, and leadership practices. A central theme in his work examines how making small changes to existing teaching, learning, and leadership practices can offer. As he says speaking of creativity in education:

I talk about the concept of lesson unplanning. Its not about starting all over again, its about starting with what you already have, which may be an over-planned lesson, where youve predetermined what the outcome is, how to get there, what itll look like when you get there and the criteria. All that is fine when youre initially introducing a concept and rehearsing it. But once students have it, consider whether you can start removing pieces? Maybe have them come up with a different way of meeting the criteria, or come up with their own problems? So, we as educators maintain the criteriabut what if we allowed students to come up with the ways theyre going to meet that criteria?

As he says:

Its not about thinking outside the box, its about thinking creatively inside the box… were really really good at defining and specifying the task constraints down to an almost ridiculous level of detail. But were not that great about creating spaces for originally meeting those task constraints in different and unexpected ways.

Dr. Beghetto is also the latest creativity researcher to be interviewed in our ongoing article series for Tech Trends. You can find a list of all the articles in the series here, and if you are interested in just the interviews, go here. Read the complete article by following the link in the citation below:

Henriksen, D., Mishra, P. & the Deep-Play Research Group (2018). Creativity, Uncertainty, and Beautiful Risks: a Conversation with Dr. Ronald BeghettoTech Trends.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-018-0329-y

Photo credit: Punya Mishra

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1 Comment

  1. sumon kumar

    sound good, this article more informative. thanks for sharing it.

    Reply

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