Part of ‘entrepreneurial teaching’ is engaging with things you do not like (or hate).  That’s what I did with Twitter.  I originally I thought that Twitter was the dumbest, craziest, worthless site on the internet.  I had to put that aside to give this lesson a shot and it has been a great success.  Next time you think the same way about a teaching technique or anything in general, why not try it once?  After all, if you are not trying things outside of your comfort zone / personal bias (like Twitter was for me), you’re never going to improve as a teacher.

I wanted to take a few minutes to elaborate on the article and share some of my lessons learned.

• Just because a class is using Twitter, does not means that is all the class is doing.  I cannot believe I have to say this, but yes, people actually think that I have jettisoned the entire curriculum for Twitter.  Twitter is a supplement to our already robust curriculum.  Everything I do on Twitter is in addition to what we did last year.
• Twitter makes learning student directed.  There is no classroom, no textbook, no review guide.  It’s openness forces (allows) students to think on their own and organically apply knowledge.
• Students become more engaged in history when it is relevant (duh).  Since the students are, on their own, tying current news stories to themes from US History on a regular basis, it is fostering engagement.
• Applying themes from one era of history to another is critical thinking and critical thinking is a positive.  We know history repeats itself, but do you really know how much?  It only takes a student 140 characters to relate the credit crisis in Massachusetts in the 1780s to an article from today, but that student now has (at the very least) opened the door to a deeper understanding of both events.
• It doesn’t matter what type of student you are (quiet, loquacious, weak writer, creative, analytical, unfocused), Twitter can engage you.  I’ve seen it.
• Getting students to think about your course outside of class is always good.
• Some people will automatically shut off or tune out as soon as they hear the word “Twitter” – I know because I used to be one of them.
• My Twitter assignment does not “replace” the research paper component of the US History course.  However, for those not participating can opt to do a research paper instead.  Twitter, so far, has tremendously improved my students research skills, making them more information literate.  I see this as adding to, not taking away from (since nothing has changed) the research paper component of the course.  A few mentions in an EdWeek article helps give you a ‘taste’ of my class, but don’t assume you know everything that is going on.
• Twitter is not a panacea or a plague, but especially if it fits into your own strengths, give it a shot, you may be surprised at the results.

Last year one of my mentors in the History department gave me a fantastic personal learning questionnaire for each student.  She explained that she gave it to them on the first day of class and created a separate folder to keep it and other documents related to that student.  I am sure that many teachers do something similar.  I ended up using it and found it to be incredibly powerful, but not necessarily in and of itself.  Upon receipt of each form, I sat down and emailed each student to address his or her concerns, hopes, and even outside interests.  This takes a tremendous amount of time, but it helped me learn a lot about the students in my class — my target market.  A sample response would read something like this: “Dear Student, thank you for taking the time to fill out the personal learning questionnaire.  It’s great to hear that you’ve identified yourself as a visual learner.  I intend to provide a variety of resources that will play to this strength.  If you ever create any visuals that you want to share or have any ideas for visuals that the class could create, let me know.  I understand that note taking is something many students do not feel comfortable with.  I never lecture for entire periods, but we do enough note taking to help you become more comfortable with the skill as you prepare for college.  If you find yourself struggling with this, please come see me.  Kudos for making the soccer team this year.  I used to coach soccer and would love to hear from you how the team is doing.”

Not only does this exercise help me learn more about my students, but just as important, it sends a message that student feedback is personally reviewed.  This helped develop a culture of open communication in my classroom that lasted the entire year.  I give class evaluations quarterly and do a few other student reflections.  With the understanding that these are reviewed and counseled on the individual level, I received (in my mind) much more authentic feedback.

Of course I had to do my best to act on the feedback as well.  If a large portion of the class self-reports as visual learners (as the student above), I create (or provide the resources for them to create) tools that support this form of learning.  If I have someone who self-reports as a strong group leader, I give them said opportunities to shine.

Good teachers, like good entrepreneurs learn as much as they can about their target market.  They frequently request feedback and take a genuine interest in improving (or altering) their course to best maximize student learning.

If you think about all of the good teachers in your building (or in your own education) you may realize that they come in a variety of stripes: the intellectual teacher, the tough but fair teacher, the passionate teacher, the empathetic teacher, and I could go on and on. The intriguing thing is that while all of these teachers have different methods, they are all considered strong educators.

A million books and articles exist explaining the merits of some type of teacher, often wondering what a world would look like ‘if everyone would teach this way.’ Well, I have a slightly different take on this. I tend to believe that each of different type of ‘successful teachers’ has found a strategy that not only meets students’ needs, but also plays to their own strengths. In fact, I am not sure that a teacher can be successful if they are not leveraging his or her own strengths as much as possible.

To make educators more self-aware, I think that every teacher should build a personal SWOT analysis. We spend so much time worrying about our students strengths and weaknesses that we often forget to consider our own. So the next time you see a book about your hair being on fire or a what makes a good teacher article come across your Twitter PLN, stop and consider if said strategy plays to your strengths. If it does – awesome try it out, if it does not tip your hat to those it does work for and move on.

Entrepreneurs are people who reject the corporate culture in order to implement their own vision in their own way.  Corporate bureaucracy drives entrepreneurs mad because when they see problems or opportunities, the process to act on them is often cumbersome and slow (or even more likely: outside of their job description).  Being entrepreneurial means working with a persistent sense of urgency that demands quick action.  It is not difficult for someone thinking entrepreneurially to see the ‘big picture’ and strategize ways to improve a situation.  Working alone, or running a small business, allows entrepreneurial people to make the best use of their skills and somewhat idiosyncratic penchants.

However, so does teaching in your classroom.  That is what makes good teachers entrepreneurial (see Manifesto).  The problem arises, however, when teachers step outside the classroom and become employees of their school and/or district.  This entrepreneurial freedom and penchant becomes a source of tension and frustration.  It is not teachers being obstinate or insubordinate; it is simply teachers manifesting the same characteristics that make them amazing educators.  Imagine being a complete entrepreneur at one moment (in your class) and then having to step out and instantly be part of a bureaucratic machine (say in your staff meeting).  Yet despite these dichotomous realms, teachers are forced (and expected) to shift gears seamlessly.

This may sound like I am coming to a gloomy conclusion.  In fact, I do believe that as long as schools hire good (entrepreneurial) teachers, there will be tension between this cohort and the administration.  I do not see this, however, as a hopeless conclusion.  Rather, I believe these two constituencies can easily improve schools by learning to understand and embrace these differences.  If administrators viewed faculty as a cohort of hundreds of mini-entrepreneurs, they could adjust their approach and even leverage the expertise of this skilled group.

For teachers, even entrepreneurial ones, sometimes it is easy to be caught up with ‘giving demands’ as opposed to ‘satisfying demands’ (the word demand is somewhat strong, so it may be easier to think of demands as ‘pedagogical demands’).  Sometimes I get caught up ‘giving demands’ to my students only to wonder, in retrospect, if I ‘forced’ them to spend all of their time satisfying my demands without satisfying theirs?  For me this comes as an uneasy feeling deep inside my stomach — I think a feeling that every educator feels at one point or another.

On the other hand, for some assessments/activities a real symbiotic exchange where my pedagogical objectives and my students’ pedagogical needs are both met.  Obviously, these are the exchanges need to be replicated.  Sounds easy writing it down: just teach to meet your curricular objectives and the students’ pedagogical needs.  I understand that in practice this is incredibly difficult.  The reality is that the needs of one class, well really one student, often vary dramatically (and maybe change daily?!).  So while I hope to stay more in tune with my students’ demands, I think the key is to hone in on large ‘demand trends’ among students.  For example, I see hundreds of good teachers on Twitter every day trying to adjust proactively to meet the demands of their students.  Many conversations revolve around the inclusion of social media in the classroom.  We already know that most teachers work a significant amount during summer ‘vacation’, but can you imagine if every single teacher sat down and really brainstormed different ways to respond to his or her students’ pedagogical demands before class started!?

I think a good teacher responds to the demands of his or her classroom everyday in some way.  For many, it is part of that innate entrepreneurial trait to add value, take advantage of opportunity, and satisfy demand.  Others, I think could benefit from professional development that helps them flip their ‘entrepreneurial switch’ in a very similar way that Darryl’s was by his entrepreneurship class in high school.

I feel like this entrepreneurial urge sometimes conflicts with the ultra-serial nature of some entrepreneurs and some teachers.  That spirit pushes us to create, create, create, sometimes at the expense of scaling existing lessons.  I know, for me, that is something I really want to work on.  After all, a good lesson is something that should impact the class not just on that day, but for the rest of the semester … and I do not just mean in coincidental ways, but in planned, measured activities.  Can we take a good lesson and have it affect the entire semester supporting deeper comprehension and fostering critical thought?  I almost would say that, in fact, you cannot achieve deeper comprehension and critical thought without this type of scaled lesson planning.  Looking back on some of my lessons from last year and I definitely missed some great opportunities to ‘scale’ a lesson.  By not considering ‘scaling’ these lessons I effectively kept them in a bubble and my students missed out.

Obviously, this is not something applicable for every lesson.  As I allude to above, I am not espousing something that I am some master at, by any means, but I do strive to reflect this principle.  If I look at my US History curriculum and think of it like a house, most objectives serve as the bricks of the house allowing me to build up, or scale, it into the finest little abode on the street (or so I wish to believe).  Other objectives are like the furniture of the house.  Yes, they are tangential and part of its essence, but the pieces do not necessary build off one another.  In the end, I think we want to make sure that we have a house with furniture as opposed to some furniture with some bricks.

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.

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 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).

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.