Week 05: Contemplate
Module #5: Rethinking Risk (July 21 - 27)
I. Essential Questions
- How can we redefine risk in a positive, exhilarating sense?
- Are you risk averse or a risk seeker?
- How skilled are you at taking reasonable risks and achieving your goals?
- What can we do to teach students the value of responsible risk?
- How can failure become a tool for success?
II. Introduction to Rethinking Risk
To have formidable adaptability and agility skills in a world of incessant transition and change, one must build risk-taking abilities. The biggest risk in this day and age is to not take risks at all. Taking risks allows us to fail, the greatest learning experience in the world, and to fail forward, so that we build up a tool set of experiences that allow us to gauge our risk tolerance, and to assess which risks are worthy, and those that are not.
Navigating into uncharted and sometimes uncomfortable waters allow us to build up risk continuum understanding and provide us with fear mitigation, while simultaneously teaching us new languages (figuratively). Well thought out and calculated risk is the reward, and whether one succeeds or fails is irrelevant. It is the risk taking experience itself that is the intrinsic treasure. In their book, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential in Us All Links to an external site., Tom and David Kelley argue,
A widely held myth suggests that creative geniuses rarely fail. Yet according to Professor Dean Keith Simmonton of the University of California, Davis, the opposite is actually true: creative geniuses from artists like Mozart to scientists like Darwin, are quite prolific when it comes to failure- they just don’ let that stop them. His research has found that creative people simply do more experiments….They take more shorts at the goal" (pg. 40).
To welcome risk is an essential skill of today’s entrepreneurial educator and today's lifelong learner. Of course, this is easier said than done. Rethinking risks involves looking at some of our assumptions and belief systems about life. Do we think win-lose or win-learn? What role does fear play in our decisions? Can we fail forward? Can we allow our students to learn from mistakes or do we rescue them? So take a risk and involve yourself in this module!
III. Key Terms
- Risk Aware: The biggest risk is to take no risks at all. The only way to become aware of risk is to experience and consciously evaluate it. Understand where you fall on the risk continuum.
- Continuum of Risk: A continuous sequence of risk measurement, with Risk Avoidance (paralysis) and Reckless Risk (Unsubstantiated and hopeless) bordering the extremes. Taking good substantiated risk is the reward!
- Chance and Choice: Chance and choice have a relationship with one another: To take a chance is in itself a choice made. Similarly, any choice made is always comprised of an element of chance. Whichever way one lives life, it is the result of a combination of chance and choice since neither is completely free of the other.
- Lose-Learn: The greatest learning experiences, leading to clinical analysis and depth, are those when we may fail, when we lose.
- Fear-based Decisions: The risk of wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.
IV. Contemplate Course Videos
|
|
|
|
Click the " Next
|