This is the draft of my chapter on creativity in the book Creative Provocations: Speculations on the Future of Creativity, Technology & Learning co-edited by Danah Henriksen and Punya Mishra that is recently published online. Read the published article here.
 
How Not to Kill Creativity?
Yong Zhao
University of Kansas
University of Melbourne
People in education have a very bad habit. Whenever something is said to be important, we try to teach it. Social and emotional learning (SEL) has gained importance so there are programs to teach it. Computational thinking is now considered important, so schools should teach. …

Improbable Probabilities: The Unlikely Journey of Yong Zhao co-authored by G. Williamson McDiarmid and Yong Zhao will be published by Solution Tree in November. Below is the preface.
 
Preface
Everyone is born with a probability for their future. Birth locations, family circumstances, and community resources shape the likelihood of a particular life in the future.1 For instance, a person born in a remote rural area is much less likely to work on Wall Street than a person born in a wealthy suburb of a big city. Similarly, a person born into a family with …

Learning for Uncertainty: Teaching Students How to Thrive in a Rapidly Evolving World 
By G. Williamson McDiarmid and Yong Zhao
Published by Taylor and Francis on Jan 31 2022
Introduction
How do we prepare our children for a world that is yet to be made? This is the question we want to know and we try to explore in this book.
As we write this, educators across the globe are struggling to educate students amidst a world-wide pandemic.  Many are being stretched to adopt and use unfamiliar instructional technologies and pedagogies.  For their part, most students, …

I co-authored this article with Daniel Yiorgios Rigney, which is just published. Below is the abstract and you can read the entire article here.
Outcomes in education are complex and numerous. Seemingly simple instructional choices can have far reaching implications for a student’s interest in a subject, their social network, and even their psychological well-being. These types of outcomes are rarely studied however. Interest in short-term instructional outcomes is far more prevalent, as made evident by the popularity of yearly high-stakes testing. Combatting this trend will require educators and policy makers …