Entrepreneurial Teaching

In my last job, I spent a lot of time around venture capitalists.  They often judged our business plan competitions and mentored students.  A frequent question they asked the budding entrepreneurs was be something like, ‘does you plan allow for taking your business to scale?’  In other words, are you constructing a business plan that works only in a bubble or will you be able to expand and grow it?  The merits of ‘bigger is better’ aside, all entrepreneurs want to see their business grow in some regard.  Maybe growth means serving 200 customers a day as opposed to 150 or expanding from just coffee to pastries and coffee, but some form of scaling takes place in every small business.

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.

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.

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.