Taking risks in your classroom can definitely be beneficial. Stepping out of your comfort zone fosters a growth mindset and is something you can model for your students. There have been plenty of times I tried something new, only for it to fail. I don’t look at it as failure but as opportunity for growth and learning.
One specific time I can remember is when I was teaching 6th grade Science. We had come to the end of the year after all the testing and I had a week or so where I wanted to do something ‘fun’… haha. One of the skills students learn in 6th grade Science is calculating speed, so I thought I would look up fun ideas where they could make their own cars and calculate the speed for them…something ‘fun’ but still under the context of something we’ve learned. I found an idea online where the cars could be made out of edible items and for whatever reason thought this was a great (and cheap) option. After letting the kids explore and create edible cars (some were very well thought-out!), I took the kids outside to roll the cars down a ramp in hopes to calculate speed from time and distance rolled. Well…the cars didn’t even move!!! Here I am, thinking to myself that I just wasted a whole week of instruction for this, but I quickly changed my mindset when my principal (who happened to come out to watch the whole thing) made a comment about them having fun and me learning for next year. I quickly updated my lesson plans to reflect something more practical, and the kids saw me take a risk, make a mistake, and fix it.
The same risk-taking concept can be applied to digital learning. Sometimes we are stuck in a habit of doing things the way we’ve always done them, but that isn’t always what is best for our students. In the technology era we are in, our teaching needs to meet students where they are. I believe it was Dr. Harapnuik who always questions, are teaching today’s kids for yesterday or tomorrow?