Live and Learn

Ken Robinson has said that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

In today’s Corner Office interview in the Business Section of The New York Times, Jeffrey Katzenberg discusses how his leadership style has blossomed over the years. He introduces two equations that go hand-in-hand with Robinson’s statement.

original + unique = risky

risky = some failure

His point is that if you want to come up with something (in his case, film ideas) different from what everyone else is coming up with, then you have to be prepared to take a risk. And if you are prepared to take a risk, you have to accept that there will be a certain number of failures.

Hmm, isn’t that a big component of life learning?

As part of a series on “Thoughts on Teaching” for Michigan State University’s Teaching Assistant Programs, an author (article unsigned)  has written about taking risks in the classroom. The author discusses risk taking from the perspective of the teacher, and provides some tips about how to take risks with lecturing (don’t lecture, try another approach), discussion (use the group), and assessment (gather it and respond to it). The author mentions Dr Alice Dreger’s comments given at a MSU Seminar on College Teaching.

According to the author, “the ‘heart’ of Dreger’s risk-taking philosophy is the belief that shared success and failures create trust between teachers and students.”

Hmm, model risk taking and turn the teaching process into a two-way learning process. I like the sound of that!