Entrepreneurial Teaching

The other day I dusted off an old copy of Steve Mariotti’s The Young Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting and Running a Business.  As I flipped through the book (of course, with my nascent blog at the front of my mind), a section heading stopped me in my tracks: “HOW ENTREPRENEURS RESPOND TO DEMAND.”  In this section, Mariotti explains the story of Darryl, a young entrepreneur who started a video game rental service some time ago.  At the time, none of the video stores in his Newark neighborhood offered rentals on video games.  As a teenager, though, Darryl knew that option would be very appealing to kids like himself.  So Darryl created a business and, perhaps subconsciously, responded to the ‘demands’ of the market for video game rentals.  The business rewarded Darryl with handsome profits and his customers with an affordable way to play/try different video games.

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 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.