Learners as Entrepreneurs

A theme of current progressive education reform is that of enabling and assisting learners in developing an entrepreneurial spirit.  Yong Zhao in his book, World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, proposes that learner entrepreneurship should be integrated into school curriculum due to the following:

1. Massive changes brought about by population growth, technology, and globalization not only demand but also create opportunities for “mass entrepreneurship” and thus require everyone to be globally minded, creative, and entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurship is no longer limited to starting or owning a business, but is expanded to social entrepreneurship, policy entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship.
2. Traditional schooling aims to prepare employees rather than creative entrepreneurs. As a result the more successful traditional schooling is (often measured by test scores in a few subjects), the more it stifles creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit.
3. To cultivate creative and entrepreneurial talents is much more than adding an entrepreneurship course or program to the curriculum. It requires a paradigm shift—from employee-oriented education to entrepreneur-oriented education, from prescribing children’s education to supporting their learning, and from reducing human diversity to a few employable skills to enhancing individual talents.
4. The elements of entrepreneur-oriented education have been proposed and practiced by various education leaders and institutions for a long time but they have largely remained on the fringe. What we need to do is to move them to the mainstream for all children.

John Seely Brown’s DLM 2012 keynote focused on entrepreneurial learners and that in this networked age, there are endless possibilities for entrepreneurship:

Brown says that in past centuries, the infrastructure has largely been stable, but that the 21st century is driven by continual, exponential advances in computation, with no stability in sight. We’re moving, he says, from a world of stocks (i.e. fixed assets) to the world of flow. In a world of stocks, we look to protect and deliver authoritative knowledge assets and to transfer old knowledge to other people. But in the world of exponential change, it’s not a question of looking at fixed assets. It’s more a question of how we participate in knowledge flows and of how, from that participation, we can pick up new ideas and create new knowledge.  In the past, our identity was defined by what we wore, what we owned and what we controlled. Young people today, Brown says, see their identity as what they create, what they share and, most importantly, what others build upon.

Benefits and Entrepreneurship

Through entrepreneurship education, young people learn organizational skills, including time management, leadership development and interpersonal skills, all of which are highly transferable skills sought by employers. According to a report by the D.C. Children and Youth Investment Corporation, other positive outcomes include:

• improved academic performance, school attendance; and educational attainment
• increased problem-solving and decision-making abilities
• improved interpersonal relationships, teamwork, money management, and public speaking skills
• job readiness
• enhanced social psychological development (self-esteem, ego development, self-efficacy), and
• perceived improved health status (http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/fact/entrepreneurship.htm)

Example Initiatives

In a business academy in Oakland, California, a group of teenagers took the initiative to fight truancy and design a new school. In the process, they won a national student leadership competition.

Stephen Ritz’s Bronx classroom features the first indoor edible wall in NYC DOE which routinely generates enough produce to feed 450 students healthy meals and trains the youngest nationally certified workforce in America. His students, traveling from Boston to Rockefeller Center to the Hamptons, earn living wage en route to graduation.

New Website: Technology-Enhanced Social Emotional Activities

http://www.projecthappiness.org/programs/social-emotional-learning/

Schools that create socially and emotionally sound learning and working environments, and that help students and staff develop greater social and emotional competence, in turn help ensure positive short- and long-term academic and personal outcomes for students, and higher levels of teaching and work satisfaction for staff.  http://casel.org/why-it-matters/benefits-of-sel/

The Technology-Enhanced Social Emotional Learning Activities website (http://seltechnology.weebly.com/) has been designed to describe technology activities that facilitate social emotional learning.  They can be used within formal and informal educational settings.  Even though the focus of the activities are on building and enhancing social emotional learning, many can be connected with content standards related to language arts, visual arts, oral communication, media literacy, and ISTE’s National Education Standards for Students.  Also, age levels are not recommended.  Most of the activities can be adapted for any age level.

List of Activities:

• Acts of Kindness
• Book Trailers
• Collage of Feelings
• Conflict Management Strategies Posters
• Dear Abby Letters
• Feelings Posters with Photos
• I Am Posters
• Identifying Emotions Apps
• Mobile Sharing
• Personal Support Networks
• SEL Comic Creation
• Social Media a Cause
• Teach Tech to Grandparents
• Twitter for Good

Technology Enhanced Social Emotional Learning Activities by Jackie Gerstein is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://seltechnology.weebly.com/

Educator’s Guide – Am I Doing It “Right?”

What follows is an informal questionnaire I use to evaluate if an educator is doing it right:

• Do the learners’ eyes light up when they see your?
• Do your eyes light up when you see your learners?
• Do the learners excitedly enter the classroom?
• Do the learners hesitantly leave the classroom at the end of the day/lesson – often saying, “Is it time to go already?”
• Do learners feel comfortable asking you questions about what, how, and why they are learning in your class?
• Do you see learners’ eyes flicker with new understandings?
• Because of what they are learning in your class, do learners want to tell you about what they have read, created, seen, and/or thought about?
• Do the learners ask if they can get on the computer to learn more about a topic being covered in class?
• Do learners critically examine and question topics being covered?
• Do you see your learners’ sense of wonder – the sense found in young children as they discover the world around them?
• Do learners get to tap into, explore, and use their personal passions during your class?
• Do learners propose learning projects to you – things they’d like to do in your class?
• Do learners spend extra, not-required time outside of class studying and/or working on topics covered in class?
• Does your heart break at the end of the school year when you say goodbye to your learners?
• Do learners contact you after your class has ended to share difficulties and successes?
• Do the learners contact later in life to say you have made a difference? (Note:  This is more realistic given social media.  I have had several students do so and it is an amazing gift.)

Doing it right is never about the worksheets, tests, textbooks, or scripted curriculum.

Others?  Please suggest them!

Students Make Hats Depicting Favorite Literary Characters

PBL is Passion-Based Learning: Show Me Your Passion

During the weekend of July 30-August 1, I attended the Reform Symposium, an online conference for educators, administrators, parents and students.. One of the sessions was by Angela Maiers, What the Heck is a 21^st Century Skill Anyway? in which she spoke of her Dream Team.  My big “aha” from her session was providing students with the opportunity to live like a scientist, an artist, a mathematician …

Let them find their hero(s) — their choice, not yours. Once they pick their hero(s), have them dive into what made them tick – and what made them successful.

Fast forward one week later.  I watched a segment on 60 minutes about Jose Andres, a molecular gastronomy specialist.  My interest in this man was instantaneous due to his extreme passion for culinary arts.  When asked to describe him, a food critic stated, “Expect wonders.” The why’s and what’s of high school didn’t interest him so he dropped out to enroll in cooking school.  I repeat, he quit high school to pursue his passion.  What is the purpose of education especially in this century? Shouldn’t at least one major purpose be to nourish students’ passions?

Passion-Based Learning appears in the Blog-o-sphere every so often, most notably through the words of John Seely Brown.  During his New Media Consortium keynote this past summer, he stated:

What’s the mindset? A passionate pursuit of extreme performance with a deep questing disposition and a commitment to indwelling. Perhaps we should teach not skills, but dispositions. Immersion in, not about; marinating in the phenomena. Without digital media, this quest and this indwelling and this immersion would not be possible.

As I see it, if the characteristics of Passion Based Learning could be identified, they would include:

• Self and Intrinsically Motivated, Learner-Driven
• Individualistic
• Desire for Deep Understanding of the Content-Topic
• Driven by Innovation and Creativity
• Vision of What Can Be
• Desire to Make the World Better Via the Passion

If a student is passionate about a topic, doesn’t it make sense to have that student study, really study, professionals who who are also passionate?

Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field.

It is passion-based learning, motivated by the student either wanting to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make, or perform something (John Seely Brown)

A student, who is passionate about culinary arts, has a possibility of learning about culinary arts through Jose Andres.  Not only could this student learn about the craft of culinary arts, but also study and “practice” some of the dispositions.  Andres owns several restaurants, teaches a course in culinary physics, works with Harvard scientists to understand the science of food, and works at a food kitchen.  Some segments from an Interview with Jose Andres exemplify these dispositions:

Don’t be afraid to fail. I came to New York to open a Catalan restaurant that later closed. Failure, right? But not really, because that brought me [to the United States] and out of that came everything else … A lot of young people are afraid to make mistakes, and I think that keeps them from succeeding. Churchill said success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. So screw up, but don’t lose heart. Learn from it and keep moving.

Being on the board of directors of D.C. Central Kitchen, a non-profit that feeds the hungry and offers culinary arts training to the unemployed. Meeting Robert Egger, founder of this amazing organization that fights hunger and creates opportunity and trying to help him achieve his dream … to make sure no one is hungry and that we give opportunities to those people who want to contribute. That has been my sidekick job for 14 or 15 years and is probably the one that has given me the most joy.

As I watched the 60 Minutes segment and read through interviews I found online, I realized that it becomes much more than learning about the culinary arts.  It becomes a way of being in the world, the dispositions that contributes to success as a culinary artist.

Due to the Internet, the student can read and view media about Jose Andres, possibly connect directly with Jose Andres, and find similar minded students-professionals.  Follow-up could include the  study of molecular gastronomy, volunteering at a local soup kitchen, and writing/preparing his-her own recipes. This, in essence, would become a Personal or Individualized Learning Plan (PLP).  The student would learn about – live the dispositions of the culinary artist.

Even though I think students should find their own passion mentors, I believe that in my role as a tour guide of learning possibilities (how I explain my role as an educator), I can help identify possibilities.  I have begun a list . . .

• Architecture – Cameron Sinclair
• Animation -  John Alan Lasseter
• Online Gaming – Jane McGonigal
• Creative Writing – JK Rowling
• Data and Statistics – Hans Rowling

This year, I have a half-time job as the technology instructor for a K-8 Charter school.  I plan post a big sign in my classroom that says, “Show me your passion!”

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)

Beginning during my Doctoral studies and continuing throughout my professional career as an educator, I discovered and keep re-discovering how congruent the concepts related to Progressive Education, Participatory Research, and Reflective Practice are with my beliefs about good education, learning, assessment, and research. Conversely, the practices related to Quantitative Testing and Research and Essentialism never worked in my scheme of what good education entails. What I knew, intuitively, to be de-motivating and toxic for me as a high school and undergraduate student, I became able to articulate with words.

I absolutely understand the need and desire for accountability and evidence of efficacy. Concrete evidence, scalablity, and the ability to duplicate best practices actually are the indicators for a profession being viewed as a profession. The problem lies in that the education system’s efforts in demonstrating efficacy occur through quantitative methodologies. There are several problems with this approach:

• Human behavior and learning is complex – assigning numbers to learning is reductionist, implying that learning is a simplistic process that it can be measured in the same manner that blood pressure can be measured.
• Quantifying learning does not provide the in-depth descriptions of best practices for other educators and students. Best practices – the success stories of education cannot be duplicated based on viewing test scores.
• Students become commodities, where their value is measured by the numbers assigned based on test scores.

At the Reform Symposium (an online conference), I had the privilege of listening to Monika Hardy and her students/cohorts (for the archive, see http://reformsymposium.com/blog/2010/07/12/monika-hardy/) . Of special interest to me was the part presented by James Folksmead on Youth Participatory Action Research #YPAR. His Prezi can be viewed at http://prezi.com/kx2njm16ouqy/par/

It became an earth moving AHA for me – the missing piece of my perspective on “good education”.  Students should be part of the research process. Note that the emphasis here is on part of the research process not the subjects of the research.

I got motivated to do a search on YPAR. What follows are excerpts from a refereed research conference paper, Students: From Informants to Co-Researchers.

It could be argued that the dominant discourses of schooling, in relation to curriculum, assessment and pedagogy are grounded in psychological, rather than sociological, perspectives. Power differentials between teachers and their students are less often discussed from such a perspective. Students are typically positioned as immature, not yet fully capable children

This power differential between teachers and their students, as manifested in schools and classrooms, is reflected in the educational research processes themselves. Students are at worst the objects and at best the subjects of the research. They are not seen as participants in the processes of enquiry. Indeed, Morrow and Richards (1996) note that within existing ethical guidelines on human research in medicine, children are considered alongside adults with impairments. In other words, they are not seen to have status, but to be vulnerable. They are characterised as relatively incompetent and at risk of exploitation.

Studies centered around the experiences of young people in schools typically position the students as the objects of the research. They are observed, surveyed, measured, interviewed and commented upon in order to inform a research agenda to which they have made little contribution. They are rarely recognized as active agents, who can not only be reliable informants, but also interpreters of their own lives. The positioning of young people in educational research is analogous to that of women within traditional patriarchal research paradigms. They are at worst, silenced; at best patronized.

The authors describe their ideas for Principles for Substantive Participative Engagement in Research by Students:

1. The purposes of the research should be in the best interests of the students;
2. The purposes of the research should be transparent and consented to by all key stakeholders, including students;
3. The research should be respectful of the students’ definitions of the phenomena being examined and incorporate methodologies which allow for varying levels of literacy and oracy;
4. Students should be active in providing input and advice regarding the initiation and design of the research;
5. Students either directly, or by representation, should be partners in the research’s enactment and interpretation;
6. Students should have a voice in determining the implications of the research for appropriate educational policies and practices;
7. Students should be enabled, by provision of appropriate resources (such as time, space, technologies and materials) to be fully participative in the research.

The benefits as I see . . .

• Students assess what they learned, how they learned it . . . and reflect on their learning as part of their participation. They learn the skills for reflective practice. They learn to be critical consumers and producers of their own learning.
• The boundaries between assessment and research become blurred . . . as it should be. Assessment becomes naturalistic and descriptive rather than reductionistic and contrived.
• Best practices are described, developed, and disseminated through the collaborative efforts of educators and students, the populations who have the vested interest in these practices. This increases the validity of these practices in the eyes of these stakeholders and the chance/opportunity for implementing these best practices. The quality of education improves.