The Importance of Risk-taking in Teaching & Learning

by Noah Geisel

Earlier this week, the following headline popped up on my daily stat app: "Twice the R&D Budget Doesn’t Get You Twice the Innovations"

The study of around 100 semiconductor and related companies revealed that when companies double down on Research & Development, the effort “leads to just a 22.5% increase in new-product announcements.”

The language in the interpretation of this study (“leads to just...”) implies this is not an acceptable return on investment. One person I can think who might beg to differ is baseball player Ken Griffey, Jr. Had The Kid been able to reap a 22.5% benefit from putting twice as much into R&D on his home run swing, he would have retired with 771 career home runs, 9 more than all-time leader Barry Bonds (Hmmm...). One man's interpretation of diminishing returns is another's immortal legacy.

How does this relate to teaching and learning?

Research & Development are closely tied to risk-taking. As an educator, I am constantly challenging my students to push themselves in the 21st Century Skill of risk-taking, a key force behind invention, innovation and, I believe, general success in 2011 and beyond. Risk-taking is the lone subjective component found in every rubric students receive in my class - to the tune of at least 20% of the total grade. Risk-taking is also the only way a student may earn extra credit on any given assignment. It is one way of showing the students the floor and not the ceiling: show students the ceiling of expectations and some heads may bump the fan; show students only the floor and some will touch the clouds.

Giftedness and Motivation

Received a bunch of emails about Dan's response from yesterday. Here's the gist of two of them.

Reader:

Is it really that easy to spot genius? Lord knows which of the students in my classes are little Einsteins... I can barely get them to do homework.

Reader:

And to tell you the truth, I've got enough on my plate with the kids with this issue and the kids with that issue to really worry about if Johnny Einstein is getting hard enough work.

The 'genius' tag is a hard one to pin down. Traditionally, with regard to verbal intelligence, we've talked about 'giftedness' in terms of students raking in IQ scores over twice the standard deviation of mean; in other words, students scoring over 130 (and more convincingly over 140) on a standard aptitude test. You can also think about it as a student ranking in the 98% percentile.

But, Gardner's research blew a wide hole in that theory of genius. After all, you don't even have to be literate to be a genius musician or painter. Back in the '90s the Sternberg studies demonstrated that students with different strengths respond with different levels of success to different assessments of intelligence. Therefore, a strict adherence to a verbal definition of intelligence is actually going to present a skewed understanding of overall intelligence -- perhaps even more so at those extremes above the second standard deviation.

And therein lies the problem.

Folks often equate giftedness with academic excellence. But the research shows no direct link between the two. In fact, by proportion, in relation to aptitude, there may be more underperforming GT students than underperforming students at any other general aptitude level.

So what does little Einstein look like?

No one knows.

And that's precisely why it's so important to differentiate the instruction and refrain from constant drill, drill, drill. Because something we do know about gifted kids is that by and large mundane tasks act as a discouragement to them. So some of those kids who seem to be struggling in your 'beginner-level' courses might actually be ridiculously gifted kids who are utterly bored and quickly becoming reactionary towards education precisely because it is so unmotivating to them.