While creativity and innovative thinking are highly valued in society overall, the inclusion of a creativity mindset as part of the pedagogical process has remained, for the most part, elusive. In this article, we discuss the importance of viewing productive failure as a critical component to fostering a creativity mindset in the classroom through…

Greek literature prior to Plato featured two conceptions of education. Learning takes place when people encounter "teacher-guides"--educators, mentors, and advisors. But education also occurs outside of a pedagogical relationship between learner and teacher-guide: people learn through painful experience. In composing his dramatic…

Despite the call for instructional designers to employ design thinking as a means to foster creativity in problem-solving, many students struggle with enacting creative risk. While several studies have been conducted studying how instructional designers engage in problem-solving to contend with project constraints, few have addressed whether this…

Improved access to higher education can reduce social and economic inequality only if universities achieve equality in graduation rates of different groups of students. Concerned about first year failures among first-generation students, a university in Chile devised a between-semesters course intended to allow failed students to remain with their…

Often, when middle-school students make mistakes, they tend to erase their work and record the correct answer without trying to understand what led to the mistake. In response, this article describes three opportunities educators can leverage for engaging students in the processes of reasoning and sense making about mathematics.

Failure is a common experience in the lives of musicians and educators that is frequently seen as a negative attribute for performances in music education. By shifting from a negative, destructive approach to a positive, constructive orientation to failure, music educators can help their students learn and advance forward from experiences of…

Being creative always involves risk, and educators need to support students in taking "beautiful risks"--actions that have the potential to make a positive, lasting contribution to other's lives. To offer such support, educators must take risks too. Beghetto describes three "beautiful risks" educators can take to foster…

Employing authentic cases experienced by practitioners in educational contexts is critical to expanding students' experience and engaging students in authentic problems to promote their real-world problem-solving skills. Although in real life, practitioners experience both success and failure and learn from both, little research has been done so…

We implemented a STEM task that highlights the engineering cycle and engages students in productive struggle. Students problem solved in productive ways and saw tangible benefits of revising their work to achieve mathematical goals.

Problem solving plays an essential role in all scientific disciplines, and solving problems can reveal essential concepts that underlie those disciplines. Thus, problem solving serves both as a common tool and desired outcome in many science classes. Research on teaching problem solving offers principles for instruction that are guided by learning…

An important element of the classroom assessment event and student performance occurs when students are wrong, which is often denigrated in our success-oriented secondary schools where only being right is valued and reinforced. This article argues that being wrong (sometimes) is an essential experience that enhances learning and motivation.…

This article outlines a role for constructive failures in virtue education. Some failures can be catastrophic and push the agent toward vice, but other types of failure can have positive consequences, we'll call these failures constructive failures, failures that help on the road to virtue. So, while failures are generally appealed to as examples…

Global value networks are often large, complex, and opaque. Understanding the relationships among stakeholders involved in these networks or organizations can be challenging. This card sort task provides an interactive way to engage participants in questioning the roles of stakeholders who are involved in a business ethics dilemma or an…

The purpose of this article is to explore the concept that embracing failure is an important pedagogy for visual arts classrooms in order to instill more creative thinking in students. The authors cover personal examples from work with graduate students in education and describe their learning through failure. The article also highlights…

The Australian Science Teachers Association offers an innovative international professional development program for science teachers called the Science Teachers Exchange -- Japan. The program offers Australian and Japanese teachers an opportunity to travel to the corresponding country, allowing the teachers to grow in their knowledge of the…