Entrepreneurial Teaching

When I worked with high school students on their business plans one of the hardest concepts for them to understand was ‘target markets.’  Invariably, a student would choose an extremely broad market like ‘upper and middle class men under 35’ or even ‘the whole world.’  I told them they might have a very small marketing budget, imagine only $25 per month.  Where could you advertise, within your budget that reached the highest percentage of likely customers?  They would not have money to waste reaching people who were not potential customers.  For example, what percentage of people that read the local newspaper is going to purchase your custom urban t-shirt designs?  Would the readers of the local gazette find value in your product?  They slowly began to realize that they really had to know their target market, down to the detail, in order to reach them.

This type of planning is exactly what good teachers do when lesson planning.  I often come up with a great lesson plan and neglect to consider what type of student benefits most from that type of instruction; this is a huge, but common mistake.  I am sure every teacher has made this mistake least once, in fact, many I worked with made it every day.  I do not think that makes me (or them) bad teachers, but it does represent an area for improvement.  The main problem with not considering what type of student our instruction is that we cannot support the student who is not inherently wired to the type of instruction for that day.

This question inherently leads into differentiation.  This is an example of the teacher’s job being much more difficult than the entrepreneur’s is.  In fact, differentiation really turns a teacher into an uberentrepreneur.  The entrepreneur must focus on one target market; the teacher should focus on many different types of learners.  In an ideal world, we differentiate our lessons every day for every learner.  I am going to go out on a limb here and say that teachers who do this everyday, for every lesson are the rare gems of the educational world and not the norm.  For the rest of us, on those days where we choose not to differentiate on all levels, I think simply taking the time (before instruction) to recognize what type of learner would benefit the most from a certain day’s lesson it can help a tremendous amount.

I would even argue for adding a new field to your personal lesson plan template: targeted learner.  This way we could have a record of which classification is receiving the most value added from each lesson.  A quick way to do this would be to use intelligence divisions (analytical, practical, and creative).  This would allow us to look back through our lesson plans and note good (or bad) trends.  We may see that our last five lessons suited only analytical and creative thinkers.  A teacher then may be prompted to add in a lesson targeted to practical thinkers.  Also, by consciously thinking about who benefits most from a lesson beforehand, we can provide additional support to students who struggle with that type of instruction.

As a last aside, this blog entry only really discusses the lesson plan, but I think to be truly effective with identifying your target students, you really need to consider (separately) assessments as well.

I recently wrote about being an ‘opportunity aware’ teacher and why I think it’s important in classrooms.  One opportunity that came to me only after the Whipple Hill User Conference in Boston was that of Twitter.  I am a very ‘tech forward’ teacher, but ironically have been a staunch hold out of Facebook and consistent basher of all things Twitter.  Needless to say I am now a Twitter convert (though not Facebook).

So here are some of the Twitter-related opportunities I see (for me personally):

1) all students can now carry cell phones in school
2) we’re going 1-to-1 (macbooks) in 2010-2011
3) students spend an incessant amount of time on their mobile devices and home computers.
4) Twitter offers a unique platform to aggregate different parts of the internet
5) Twitter is simple, instantly gratifying, and can be used from many different interfaces (all important to students).

I am sure that there are more, but this is what came to me at first. So the question became how can I use Twitter to enhance my classroom experience or, if I was an entrepreneur, how do I take advantage of this opportunity to add value for my customer?

Given my excitement over this opportunity, I turned to our first unit in US History. The US History curriculum (non AP) at our school starts with the present day first and then begins with pre-colonial North America.  This approach allows our team to highlight the key historical trends that we will be discussing all year with news stories that are happening today. It provides a nice level of relevancy that the students carry with them throughout the year.  Usually, as a team, we put together a plethora of news stories to make a little primer for the two-week unit.

I currently have two ideas for extending this unit, one short term and one long term.

1) short term: cut back on the number of stories that we ‘give out’ and let the students find them on their own and make brief comments through Twitter.  Use the stories and comments to facilitate our classroom discussion.  Allow, temporarily, to use cell phones (or if they are using a laptop) in class to Tweet thoughts on our discussion as we go along (that maybe we didn’t get to or didn’t want to say out loud).

2) long term: request that every student for each chapter highlight one (two?) of the key themes and then find current events stories addressing that theme.  After finding the stories they obviously have to tweet about them with a comment.  Once a month we can come together to discuss parallels, lessons learned, emotions, etc.  Each section already has a ‘note buddy’ that is responsible for taking good notes and posting them online.  I am considering making a Twitter buddy to aggregate the postings per section into a mini ‘report’ for us to use during these discussions.

Just wanted to share a practical way I am trying to take advantage of an opportunity in my school.

When Joseph Schumpeter shared his idea of creative destruction with the economic world, he intended to praise entrepreneurs for contributing to economic growth.  The basic idea was that innovative entrepreneurs created companies that shattered the value of existing market actors.  However, the benefits of this destruction far outweighed the cost as they generated economic growth through improvements like value added inventions and/or enhanced productivity.  In other words, innovative entrepreneurs create new value, but in the process destroy the value proposition of an existing business.  A good way to look at this is through the lens of music.  From records, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, to mp3s new innovation destroyed older business models, but also provided tremendous benefits to the consumer and the music industry.

In many ways I believe our education system is in need of more entrepreneurial teachers to ‘creatively destroy’ it.  That’s one of the reasons I started this blog: to extend the idea of thinking entrepreneurially to the education field.  I don’t always agree with Bill Gates on education, but this is a really important statement that I think fits here: “Training the work force of tomorrow with the high-school students of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year old mainframe. Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting — even ruining — the lives of millions of Americans every year.”

What are you going to do to ‘creatively destroy’ your curriculum this year?

As an entrepreneur, you’re almost unconsciously on the hunt for new opportunities.  An almost cliché refrain in entrepreneur circles is “where others see problems, entrepreneurs see opportunities.”  After all, successful business development stems not just from a great idea, but also a great opportunity.  For entrepreneurs this can take many forms: fulfilling an unmet need, leveraging popular trends, improving on an existing product or service, or inventing a new product or service.  I often discussed taking advantage of trends with high school entrepreneurs; the iPod trend really resonated with teenagers.  Think of the myriad businesses that have either a) leveraged the trend of the iPod or b) created a whole new business centered on the tremendous use of the iPod.  This proved to be a really instructive example for my students.  Prior to attaching ‘opportunity’ to entrepreneurship, students simply thought creating a business centered on having an idea.  “I want to start a club because I like going to the club” or “I like fashion so I want to design custom t-shirts.”  The key was to get them to understand that the strongest businesses come not just from an idea, but an idea that is paired with an opportunity.

As teachers we can follow many of the same entrepreneurial maxims to make our classrooms a better place.  When planning a lesson, or even a unit, are we simply planning based on our ideas or are we using both ideas and opportunities.  Can we pair our ideas with a ‘hot trend’?  Does our lesson fulfill an unmet need (perhaps a learning style or skill we’ve been neglecting)?  Have we invented something new in this lesson or unit that uses our unique knowledge of this specific class or are we using ‘stock’ material?  You get the picture…

The paragraph above represents taking advantage of opportunity in the ‘planning phase’ of class, but there is a much harder time to take advantage of opportunity: in the class itself, on the fly.  Obviously, this requires a dynamic mindset permitting us to veer off course.  I struggle with this almost everyday.  I would come prepared to class with (what I thought) an amazing lesson plan, only to see the class get hooked on a theme that was merely tangential to my plan.  As someone who is pretty ‘opportunity aware’ this would be both frustrating and exciting.  Sometimes I would do nothing with that insight except file it away.  Other times I would immediately leverage this opportunity and use this insight to reach my objectives for the rest of the unit.  I recognize that, as teachers, we cannot take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself in class, but being ‘opportunity aware’ can mean a tremendous amount, if only for being a ‘tuned in’ teacher.  I finally realized that whether or not I stuck with my plan, the class or student was implicitly telling me something about how they learn (and what they wanted to learn about).

The difference between good and bad teachers comes down to one thing: entrepreneurship.  Well, more precisely, I would say that good teachers must be entrepreneurial.  This is a strange juxtaposition for many educators, but the myriad parallels between the two occupations are staggering.  Many of the same characteristics that make a good entrepreneur make a good teacher: being resilient, adding value, seeking opportunity, planning ahead, adapting to change, and understanding one’s client.

Before returning to the classroom in 2008, I worked for The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).  While working at NFTE, I consulted with over 30 teachers from the poorest school districts in the Washington, DC region.  As I visited different classrooms, I unconsciously collected a wide body of evidence as to what makes a good teacher.  Early on, I noticed a trend among the stronger teachers: many teachers were actually entrepreneurs – and not just those that teach Entrepreneurship.  The teachers I met owned everything from a small IT business to a small chain of barber shops.  Others simply did photography or tutoring, but they all saw themselves as entrepreneurs.  This surprised me at first and I chalked up the trend to the most obvious factors: summers off and low pay (not to mention the fact that by pitching an entrepreneurship curriculum I was bound to run into a few entrepreneurs).  As I spent increasing time with these educators, however, I learned one thing: these people were entrepreneurs because it is what they were good at, not just in the business world but in the classroom.

As I tried to make sense of this correlated evidence, I began to realize that it wasn’t important whether or not a teacher owned a business, but whether or not that teacher was entrepreneurial.  In fact, for many teachers their classroom was their business.  They saw their curriculum like entrepreneurs see business plans and their students like entrepreneurs see customers.  Some entrepreneurial ideas that good teachers are already thinking about: How is my lesson adding value?  How do the objectives fit into my future plans?  Can I review the plan and adapt to unforeseen change?  Does my plan take into account the student perspective?  What opportunities exist to extend this plan in the future?

In many ways, teachers are the ultimate ‘serial entrepreneurs’ because they are doing this every day.  And just like small businesses fail, so do teachers’ lesson plans.  In fact, sometimes they fail miserably.  Good teachers are inherently resilient to this failure, because this process must take place all over again … tomorrow.

All teachers should be trained to think entrepreneurially.  While traditional wisdom says entrepreneurship cannot be taught, I object to that notion.  I prefer to think the entrepreneurial faculty exists in us all.  While some are born with the entrepreneurial mindset ‘turned on’, others are born with the switch ‘turned off’ and it takes someone to come along and flip the switch.  This is why all school administrators should not only look to hire entrepreneurial teachers, but also should be working to ‘flip’ on the entrepreneurial mindset of their current faculty.  In fact, if being entrepreneurial means all of the great behaviors above, would any existing professional development be better than imparting the entrepreneurial mindset on teachers?  If educators begin thinking about curriculum and lesson plans like entrepreneurs think about business plans it will only enhance the student experience and improve the American educational experience.

This blog will be about my teaching experiences and interests.  Most content, however, will center around this idea of entrepreneurial teaching.  It’s not something I do perfectly (or even close to it), but it is an idea that I think could inspire teachers in a positive way.