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

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Goodbye Malaysia, welcome Taiwan

So my stay in Malaysia comes to an end. I haven’t had either had time or internet access to be able to update the blog the last few days. So briefly here goes… The day after the presentation (the 13th) I had a meeting with Professors Ramayah, Rozinah, and Bala at USM...

TED is bullshit 🙂

Evrim Baran (who I often joke is the only reader of this blog) sent me this link to a set of notes by Jeff Jarvis from a TED talk he recently gave. He says that he used the opportunity of a TED event to question the TED format, especially in relation to education,...

Lego based Sudoku & Rubik Cube solving robots

Two robots made entirely using Lego Mindstorms NXT Retail-kit that can solve Sudoku problems and the Rubik's Cube! How totally cool is that. LEGO Mindstorms is a line of Lego sets combining programmable bricks with electric motors, sensors, Lego bricks, and Lego...

New edited series on Research to Practice

A few months ago I was invited (by the Educational Technology & Management Academy, an Indian educational organization) to write a series of short practitioner-oriented articles for a new educational e-magazine they were starting. The idea was to introduce to a...

The gift that keeps on giving, or Why I love the web

I recently received this email: Dear Mr. Mishra, I am currently working on a poetry research project for school, and one of the requirements is researching five different poets. While looking for people who wrote palindromic poetry, I found your website and decided to...

Symmetry: new ambigram

I love the idea of self-reference, words or sentences that refer to themselves in some manner or another. For instance consider the sentence, This is a sentence. This is an example of a relatively benign self-referential sentence. Other examples may not be less...

Review of TPACK Handbook 2nd Edition

Review of TPACK Handbook 2nd Edition

Douglas Harvey and Ronald Carol, both at Stockton University in New Jersey have reviewed the 2nd Edition of the TPACK Handbook for the journal TechTrends. You can find the review here.  Complete reference and a link to the first chapter of the handbook...

Only one recipe…

I have been catching up on my reading of Slate and came across this gem of an article by Judith Shulevitz titled, The care and feeding of fiction. Shulevitz has written a quasi-review of James Wood's new book How fiction works and makes we want to read the book...

Why I like naps

... because scientific research shows that sleep enhances creativity 🙂

1 Comment

  1. sumon kumar

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

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *