There’s an interesting quote on the Google Moonshot Summit website. It says:<\/p>\n
“A moonshot is an ambitious, exploratory and ground-breaking project undertaken without any expectation of near-term success or benefit and also, perhaps, without a full investigation of potential risks and benefits.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
One of the things I like about the International Baccalaureate is the insistence that a well-constructed curriculum should promote the IB Learner Profile<\/a>.<\/p>\n
One of the attributes listed is Risk-Taking<\/strong>…<\/p>\n
When my students are preparing to share a presentation with the whole class, I often remind them about how outstanding an achievement this is. “Given the choice,” I say, “between standing up in front of a group of people and giving a talk, or swimming through shark-infested waters; the vast majority of adults will reply, ‘Give me a set of trunks’!”<\/p>\n
This is one aspect of risk-taking we can model for our students. But it shouldn’t be the only one.<\/p>\n
One of the unintended consequences\u00a0of a desire to\u00a0improve standards in some schools\u00a0has been a disincentive for teachers to take risks. If a tried-and-tested formula is guaranteed to produce mediocre, but acceptable results, why should a young teacher put their future career on the line by daring to try a different approach?<\/p>\n
My contention is that the lessons learned by students participating in projects that see risk-taking in action by teachers willing to make mistakes have the potential to be more valuable than the actual subject content.<\/p>\n
This is one of the reasons why I enjoy\u00a0teaching computer science; a creative academic discipline which constantly reinvents itself as new tools become available to us. It forces us to take risks and look for new solutions to an ever-widening range of problems we feel confident to tackle.<\/p>\n
Right now, I’m also humbled by the prospect of meeting with up to 40 other like-minded risk-takers, problem-solvers and educators at Google’s Moonshot Summit in just a few short weeks. Some of them, I already know. We’ve met and shared examples of good practice before. It’s going to be an exciting time.<\/p>\n
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There’s an interesting quote on the Google Moonshot Summit website. It says: “A moonshot is an ambitious, exploratory and ground-breaking project undertaken without any expectation of near-term success or benefit and also, perhaps, without a full investigation of potential risks and benefits.” One of the things I like about the International Baccalaureate is the insistence … Continue reading Moonshot Thinking<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-styles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3.142.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3.142.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3.142.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3.142.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3.142.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3.142.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22,"href":"https:\/\/3.142.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/22"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3.142.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3.142.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3.142.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}