Educating Entrepreneurs?

Yesterday I got into an extended discussion on Twitter with Tom Peters, Mark Bradford, Jeni Little and a few others about how teacher training needs to be modified so that it is in step with the world that our students are graduating into. The discussion was sparked by this blog post by Tom Peters, which I recommend you read.

Anyway, it's got me thinking about how as an educator one can develop an entrepreneurial spirit in young people. The reason I think this is so important is because, as far as I can tell, the world that our students are going into is full of uncertainty and unpredictability. If they are to thrive in this environment they will need to be highly adaptable, and able to make the most of any new situation they find themselves in. In this context I'm defining an 'entrepreneur' as someone who is able to use their networks and practical and intellectual abilities to make the most of a situation, rather than just someone who launches new business ventures. I'm thinking social and educational start ups, not just money making.

So, that leads me to considering the role that this project is playing (or perhaps is not playing?) in developing entrepreneurs.

There is a school of thought that says that students will learn better if they are aware of what they are learning (eg having a written learning intention on the board for each lesson). We are not explicitly teaching entrepreneurial approaches through the project, and I don't think I've ever talked with the students about what they're learning in terms of them becoming entrepreneurs. But I do hope that the attitudes they're developing in relation to learning (perseverance; seeing challenges as problems to solve, not walls; making connections with others out in 'the world') are setting them up for the lives they're going to live.

Is this enough though?

I'd love to read your thoughts.

UPT Digital

On Thursday four members of our teaching team had a Skype hui with Renea and Rachel from UPT Digital in Christchurch. UPT Digital is part of Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti, a very student focused state high school in Christchurch, NZ.

UPT Digital began four years ago as an ICT class that was looking for a more inspiring name and way of operating, and now operates with a flexible structure that allows students to spend 3 or more hours a week working on self-directed IT projects in small teams with input from local and international mentors.

It was fantastic to meet with some others who are using a similarly project based approach to us, and we were simultaneously affirmed and challenged by the approach they are taking. We covered a lot of ground in the 30 or so minutes we talked, but two of the things that stood out to me are:

• UPT Digital is tailored very well to the particular context they are working in, both in regard to the students at the school and the commercial environment (IT industry) they are working with. Their projects are student-passion driven. They collaborate with industry, and are building a direct route for students to move from the school to the workplace. This lead to some interesting discussion with our teaching team after the Skype session as we considered how this approach could be applied in the context of visual arts and music, which are in some ways quite different to the IT industry.

• Renea Mackie (the project director) takes an admirably up-front approach (I hope you don't mind me writing this Renea!) to making contact directly with industry for the benefit of her students. "We were Skyping the other day with Rod Drury about Pacific Fiber"; "We were working on an event, and school wasn't open, so we talked to Vodafone and used their offices". These industry contacts act as both mentors and collaborators, and are a central part of the UPT Digital approach. This has provided great encouragement for us to strengthen the our current contacts with people in the commercial world, and work to develop many more relationships.

If you are interested in what UPT Digital are doing, and think it might be something you'd like to bring into your own school there are already a number of 'pods' operating in New Zealand and overseas. 

Students stepping up

One of the student leadership roles we have as part of Passionfruit Magazine is the Social Media Manager. This is a key role in terms of building our audience engagement within the target group. It's interesting to note that although the role might be viewed from the outside as a chance for the student in charge to play on Facebook all day, the task of engaging an audience is actually a really complex challenge. We've had a number of discussions over the past couple of weeks about the type and frequency or posts, and have tried out various approaches.

On the weekend of 2/3 March Ezra, our Social Media Manager, hit a good balance of engaging content and frequency of sharing. It's been impressive to watch how her engagement with the role has increased, and how she's becoming increasingly savvy and analytical about how she goes about the role. This was confirmed this evening by several posts she spontaneously made in our project Facebook group sharing and commenting on data from the 'Insights' section of the project page, and relating the current Facebook audience to our magazine's overall target.

It's so rewarding to see students taking control of and responsibility for their own learning!

Teachers collaborating

As I've mentioned previously, in addition to the 'Art Project' (which produces Passionfruit Magazine), this year we're also running the 'Music Project'. This project is designed to work with students who are musically very able, but who have struggled to gain the literacy and numeracy qualifications necessary for them to move into tertiary study. This group have a couple of timetable lines allocated to music and integrated curriculum learning, as well as being in an English class on their own. Most are also in an NCEA Level 1 Photography and Design class that I teach.

Because of the dense nature of many Visual Arts texts (often written in International Art English, as it has sometimes been termed!), I put quite a bit of effort into building the students' capacity for unpacking complex written texts. As you might imagine, this has brought up a few challenges for a group of students who aren't exactly lovers of written texts, let alone complex ones!

One of the major benefits of having a group of teachers focused on working with the same students is that we've been able to tackle the same challenges from different angles. A recent case in point was the English specialist (Laura Green) being able to use some English class time working with a text unpacking exercise that I'd set the students for homework. As a result, five of the of the six students who had barely attempted their initial text unpacking assessment handed the most recent one in complete, in most cases the day after they'd been given it, despite the deadline being a week away!

This may seem a small step in some ways, but considering the academic histories of these students it's a success I'm more than willing to celebrate!

Permission to screw up

When we focus too much on doing things perfectly, we don't engage in the kind of exploratory thinking and behavior that creates new knowledge and innovation - Halvorson

Recently I came across Heidi Grant Halvorson's piece about our attitude to making mistakes and how this effects out ability to be innovative: 'Why You Should Give Yourself Permission to Screw Up'. Given that we're at the start of a major project with Passionfruit Magazine (ie beginning production of Volume 2!) and that many of the students were feeling the pressure of the first deadline (for article concepts to pitch to the editor) approaching, it seemed a good idea to sit down with the crew and pull the article apart to see what we could learn from it.

In essence, Heidi's argument is that people approach any new task with one of two mindsets: the 'Be-Good' or the 'Get-Better'. The former mindset dictates that they must be good at any task they try, and consequently can be limiting in terms of approaching unfamiliar territory. The latter mindset approaches an unfamiliar situation as a chance to learn and tends to be much more resilient in the face of unexpected challenges.

Further to this, because the 'Be-Good' mindset makes us see mistakes as something to avoid it tends to result in increased levels of anxiety when approaching a problem, which reduces our working memory and gives us less ability to think creatively and analytically.

So . . . the big lesson for our students (and their teachers, who admitted that they all deal with their fair share of 'Be-Good' tendencies!) as the project gets underway is to acknowledge that what we've taken on is challenging and won't always turn out the way we hope or expect, and to agree to do our best to communicate and seek help rather than hiding from the problems that will inevitably crop up.

I guess you'll see from later blog entries this year how this has all turned out!


99u.com is Behance's education arm. It's well worth checking out, if you're not already familiar with it.

Unsolicited positive feedback

Earlier is week I received an email alert that my teacher Facebook profile had been tagged in a student post. What a pleasant surprise it was to find that the post was the lovely affirmation shown above! The student who posted it is one of the Year 12s who have joined the team this year.

2013 begins!

A new year. A new group of students. A new volume of Passionfruit Magazine. A revised approach to making it.

School started back for our seniors on Friday 1 February, so it's been just over a week since we started working with the second group of 'ArtProject' students. We've got four new Year 12 students, three new Year 13's and six Year 13's coming back for a second year of the project. That's a total of 13 students: a beautifully small class and a good number to work with, but not really sustainable in the long (multiple years) term. More about that some other time.

We're trying a few different approaches this year with regard to the structuring of learning. To begin with, rather than last year's 'Hack your learning space' exercise, which gained a lot of interest from parties outside of the project, but was not entirely successful in terms of student buy in and long term working relationships, we're sticking with the physical classroom space pretty much as it was. We'll re-arrange it according to the needs of specific phases of the project, but there will not be a major 'building phase' to begin the project.

We're also taking a more structured approach to the presentation of individual parts of the project - units of work one might call them in a more traditional classroom. While the 'We'll make authentic work for a magazine, and this will provide evidence for assessment' approach was good in theory, in practice many (probably all, to be truthful) of the students found it really challenging to work in this mode. On one hand it could be argued that this is because the school system has trained them to require spoon feeding in terms of 'do this task, then this task, then this task, then hand it in to your teacher and you'll get credits'. On another hand it could be argued that students at secondary level need some degree of breaking down of a big task into smaller, more achievable components if they are to experience success. On yet another hand, moderation requirements currently demand a fair degree of structure in assignments if a school is to retain freedom to offer all achievement standards.

The outcome of all of this is that we are presenting students with a series of open ended assignments that will (hopefully) give them the flexibility to produce the work they want to for the magazine, while at the same time giving them more structure than last year. I (Sam) am still in two minds about this, because I suspect that ultimately we need to produce learners who can break a major task down into parts they can manage, but maybe my expectations are a bit high . . .

We've also changed the teaching team, bringing a different English specialist on board, and replacing one of the Visual Arts specialists with a Music/Technology specialist. So the teaching team is now Sam Cunnane (Visual Arts/Project Leader), Anna Dowthwaite (English) and Jesse Te Weehi (Music/Technology). Jesse's role will be largely in relation to the web-based components of the magazine, but he is also leading a second integrated curriculum project in the school ('MusicPro', but more about that another time).

Cmdr_Hadfield Chris Hadfield

The Earth has problem skin; one popped, the other didn't. pic.twitter.com/2oqTv5p3

Finally, we finished the week on a bit of a high, in the middle of making arrangements to do an interview with an astronaut (Chris Hadfield) who takes photographs from the international space station. He's well worth following on Twitter - @Cmdr_Hadfield