Entrepreneurial Teaching

This summer I wrote about seeing your classes as an entrepreneur thinks about his or her target market.  This can be a very powerful tool, especially if it begins during the first week of classes.  With careful thought, and some time, an early exercise can help teachers get to know and foster an open relationship with students.

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.

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.