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.

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).