Dive Brief:

• In a piece for eSchool News, Trevor Shaw, a teacher and director of technology at New Jersey's Dwight-Englewood School, writes that encouraging students to take risks can lead to greater academic progress and social growth.
• Examples of positive risk-taking can include starting a project over from scratch when plans don't work out, or having a student learn to trust classmates during group activities in order to grow a collaborative mindset and increase teamwork.
• Shaw recommends identifying possible areas of healthy positive risk, and then aligning them to meet students' needs.

Dive Insight:

According to Shaw, such positive or "healthy" risks can be small or big, social or academic. It can also take time to get students committed to a mindset that allows them individually to be open to taking risks. On the flip side, educators should be aware of any behaviors on their part that might decrease students' drive to try new things or take risks.

"It’s ridiculous to think that a student is going to try something innovative and untested if, in addition to the consequence of an idea that doesn't work, he is punished with a failing grade," Shaw writes.

Such logic resonates with proponents of personalized learning programs like Big Picture Schools, where students earn proficiency-based diplomas and use non-traditional curriculum with peer- and community-based evaluations instead of traditional grades.