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Day 45: How Do You Create Risk Taking in Your Classroom?


I want to know how my students can be pushed to create the kinds of classrooms where their own students are safe and allowed to make mistakes and take risks. This is a mash up of growth mindset, cultural humility, third space creation, social justice. . .stuff I'm interested in. 

Source: Guzman Ingram, L. (2017, September 14). A classroom full of risk takers. Edutopia. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/article/classroom-full-risk-takers

What is Sacred:
This is a short little blog post that just includes some advice from teachers of the year about how they create classrooms that honor perseverance, share mistakes, allow retakes, discover the power of yet, and encourage failure Fridays.

Connection to Current/Future Work:
I had a student that I was concerned about not because she had some odd quirks that she displayed in the classroom, but more that she did not acknowledge that she had these weird quirks which meant that she was standing in front of a classroom of middle school students and trying to hide her issue. I don't have a problem with teachers who have quirks. But they need to trust the students and let them "into the fold." Use this opportunity to be more human. Model failure and model perseverance, even in ourselves. I have always been honest when things don't go the way I thought it would in my head. My students have never faulted me for that. Now how do I get my students to do this? When do we have this conversation, discussion, expectation within our teacher education program? 


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