Ronald A. Beghetto

Don’t sink your school’s creativity— encourage it to set sail! In this book, educational leaders will find the definitive resource for fostering schoolwide creativity. Introducing a groundbreaking framework known as the Small Steps Approach to Instructional Leadership (SAIL), Ronald A. Beghetto shows the way to amazing improvements through small adjustments. Content includes: "Creative leader checklists” summarizing actionable points in each chapter The keys to removing the most difficult creative barriers How to sit with uncertainty instead of letting it derail innovation efforts When to “flow like water”, and when to “stand like a mountain” as you re-focus your school towards creativity

How to Lead For and With Creativity

Big Wins, Small Steps

The aim of this book is to help you and your students identify the kinds of risks that are worth taking, better anticipate and navigate potential hazards associated with those risks and maximize the potential benefits.

Having the Courage to Teach and Learn Creatively

Beautiful Risks

Garrett J. Jaeger

This edited volume brings together a group of international researchers and theorists from various intellectual and analytic traditions to explore the role uncertainty plays in creativity, learning, and development. Contributors to this volume draw on existing programs of research as well as introduce new and even speculative directions for research, theory and practice. Learning and life are filled with uncertainty. Although the experience of uncertainty can cause emotional discomfort or cognitive rigidity, uncertainty serves as a catalyst and condition for change. In this way, uncertainty represents a core facet in the interrelationship among creativity, learning, and development. Considerations for both the benefits and potential costs of uncertainty will be addressed in this volume with an aim of understanding how uncertainty can be better understood in light of creativity, learning, and development. Taken together this volume stands to contribute to our collective understanding of the role that uncertainty plays in learning and life and highlights how conceptualizing and studying uncertainty in new ways can promote positive and lasting change.

Uncertainty: A Catalyst for Creativity, Learning and Development

Bharath Sriraman

Creative Contradictions in Education is a provocative collection of essays by international experts who tackle difficult questions about creativity in education from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The contributors to this volume examine and provide fresh insights into the tensions and contradictions that researchers and educators face when attempting to understand and apply creativity in educational contexts. Creativity in education is surrounded by many contradictions. Teachers generally value creativity, but question the role it can and should play in their classroom. Many educators find themselves feeling caught between the push to promote students’ creative thinking skills and the pull to meet external curricular mandates, increased performance monitoring, and various other curricular constraints. This book brings together leading experts who provide fresh, cross-disciplinary insights into how creative contradictions in education might be addressed. Contributors will draw from existing empirical and theoretical work, but push beyond “what currently is” and comment on future possibilities. This includes challenging the orthodoxy of traditional conceptions of creativity in education or making a case for maintaining particular orthodoxies.

Cross Disciplinary Paradoxes and Perspectives

Creative Contradictions in Education

Giovanni Emanuele Corazza

This edited volume provides a venue for scholars whose work challenges the typical, static conceptions, and methods of studying creativity. More specifically, the book will serve as an effort to introduce more dynamic definitions, conceptions, and approaches for studying creativity in the context of educational practice. By doing so, it feeds the strong contemporary need for more dynamic conceptions of creativity in educational settings. This is particularly important given the fast evolution of modern society and the widespread consensus that efforts to develop creative potential should be democratized -- extending well beyond the boundaries of the gifted subset and the walls of the classroom. This work recognizes that more dynamic perspectives on creativity are necessary for understanding its complexity, value, and meaning in educational contexts.

New Directions for Theory, Research, and Practice in Education

Dynamic Perspectives on Creativity

Creativity is a hot topic in education. As such, there is no shortage of insights or suggestions for how teachers might incorporate creativity into their curriculum. Wading through these suggestions can, however, be quite daunting. This is because many of these suggestions imply that teachers need to somehow radically change their approach to teaching, adopt a new curriculum, or add-on to their existing curriculum. Consequently, many teachers feel that such changes are not feasible and may even come at the cost of supporting students’ academic learning. This book provides an alternative. Teachers need not adopt a new curriculum, radically change what they are already doing, or attempt to add more to their already overflowing plate of curricular responsibilities. Rather, teaching for and with creativity is often more about doing what one is already doing, only slightly better. The aim of this book is to help teachers understand how they can make slight changes to their own teaching, which can substantially support the development of students’ creative potential and result in a more creative approach to teaching. The insights and practical suggestions presented in this book represent some of the newest and most promising work being done in the field of creativity studies. This book is unique in that it presents teachers with concrete ideas for how to simultaneously support creativity and learning. A particularly novel feature of this book is that it offers a blend of theoretical insights and vivid classroom examples to illustrate the kinds of opportunities and challenges that teachers face when they attempt to teach for and with creativity. As such, this book will provide teachers, scholars, researchers, and anyone interested in classroom creativity with new directions for future research and educational practice.

The promise and perils of creativity in the classroom

Killing ideas softly?

If a fundamental goal of schooling is to prepare young people for the unknowable future, why do we assign students so many clearly defined tasks with predetermined solutions? According to educator and creativity expert Ronald A. Beghetto, the best way to unleash students' problem solving and creativity—and thus prepare them to face real-world problems—is to incorporate complex challenges that teach students to respond productively to uncertainty. In this thought-provoking book, Beghetto explains How to foster "possibility thinking" to help students open up their thinking in creative, sometimes counterintuitive ways. The process of lesson unplanning, a way of transforming existing lessons, activities, and assignments into more complex classroom challenges. Four basic action principles that teachers and students can use to design and solve complex challenges both inside and outside the classroom. The steps for creating legacy challenges, which require students to identify a problem, develop a solution, and ensure that their work makes a lasting contribution. With planning forms and detailed sample activities, this practical guide will enable teachers at every grade level to design a full range of challenges in any subject area. Invite uncertainty into your classroom—and discover what your students are capable of.

Ronald A. Beghetto

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