5 steps to Entrepreneurship education at School

Fundamentals that parents and educators must know about entrepreneurship education.

Join 518 School Innovation Enthusiasts

A lot of parents today want to teach Entrepreneurship to their children

Most schools ignore this need but visionary school leaders can observe it and they are at least trying.

But very rarely a school is able to solve this riddle.

They are failing again and again with no remorse.

Here in this article we will help you understand how to teach entrepreneurship to school going children

The First Step to Entrepreneurship education at School

A very progressive school principal asked me, "Sir, I want to teach entrepreneurship to my students but I feel we are missing something, can you help?"

She is the founder principal of a K12 school that started 20 years ago and today boasts to have around 2500 students

I could not believe my ears that someone with such a successful career is still willing to learn.

In my past, I have interacted with several thousand school leaders for training and consultancies purposes.

and I can testify that an urge to learn the new, is kind of missing from the majority of school leaders

As they say, I don't know is the first step to learning and in case you are also a school leader who wants to consider entrepreneurship for their students, the first step is to be a LEARNER yourself.

I dedicate this article to this visionary school leader, who asked this question and who showed this willingness to learn.

The way the workplace is changing, and the way the gig economy is settling down, it is evident that not many people will get the full time jobs in future and people will have to work on their own and if we do not teach them how to do that, they will suffer.

Amidst of the depleting layer of college education, the onus will now lie on the school to prepare children for this sort of workplace.

But the conventional school do not know a thing about the future of workplace. Their whole job has been to prepare children for college.

So these are interesting times, and schools need to adapt to this shift and change accordingly.

The Second step to Entrepreneurship Education at school

A very important thing that a school leader and parent should do is to remove confusion between Startup Founder and Entrepreneur

I see that most schools do not understand this difference and almost all of them fall prey to terms like Incubator, hackathon, design thinking, funding, accelerator, and of the likes

There is nothing wrong about these terms and I am not even saying that you should not inform your students about these things at the school level.

But they are good terms for building a startup and should be shared with only those who may have graduated to this level.

But entrepreneurship is more fundamental. When I asked Shambhu Nath, a PhD scholar at IIM Ahmedabad, what is entrepreneurship education and he said, 'its like a way of thinking to find a problem for a set of people and developing an urge to solve it'

He mentioned that an entrepreneur may not have all the data or resources but s/he will still try to solve it.

Although this definition by Shambhuath was not exhaustive, but is right.

Entrepreneurship education is a mindset training and so it can be taught by those only who have this mindset.

Others do not even know, what this relic looks like or how to hunt it down.

So schools usually put the guess work and try teaching children two things

Usually the first one is sales, so they encourage children to put a lemonade stand (or any other sales counter like selling paintings, projects, t shirts etc) at a school event

And second they want to teach basic finance,

What I want school leaders to understand that entrepreneurship is not the ability to be able to sit on a shop and run it

Entrepreneurship is the ability of figuring out what is it that people really want and do not have a solution or do not have enough supply.

They think about reducing costs or they thing about building experiences, so you see both the above ideas i.e. teaching sales and basic finance does not seem to help.

So what is it that we want to teach, if we want to teach entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurial Mindset - The Third step to Entrepreneurship Education at school

So, if I am suggesting that the job of the school should be to develop the entrepreneurial mindset, than defining it cannot be exhaustive, it can only be indicative

So the following things can be a part of entrepreneurial mindset

Critical Thinking

Problem Solving

Creativity

Negotiation

Networking

Leadership

Influence

Public speaking

Storytelling

Integrity

Grit

Working in teams

Being able to create a large project independently

And the list can go on and on and all such thinking and skill set collectively gives you entrepreneurial thinking

You see, now as an adult, when you know, it is about these things, don’t you think your education will change for teaching entrepreneurship.

You may try telling them stories to inspire them,

you may give them case studies to solve problems

You may give them tasks to perform in teams

You may give them challenges to execute

So the curriculum to teach entrepreneurship can be built in the go

Build a team - The Fourth step to Entrepreneurship Education at school

So by now, your own mindset has come to a level where you understand what do you want to do and why do you want to do this and now you need to solve how do you want to do it?

The first thing would be to find a few (3 to 4) generalists who are good at critical thing.

Host a few meetings with these people. Explain them what you want and try building an external Peri ferry of the entrepreneurship education curriculum for your school.

Here you are just defining buckets, right now you are not trying to fill in those buckets.

For example with your consulting team, you find a need for teaching AI fundamentals but let's say you do not have anyone on your network who can really do that

So don't worry about it, over here you are just building the structure and you can always build upon that later.

You also need to understand that these kinds of work are dynamic and things will keep changing and that is fir the good.

So here at this step, you are trying to build ideas like, what do you want to do with preparatory level students, or middle school students. or senior school students etc.

And once it is done, now you need to build the next step.

The execution Plan - The Fifth step to Entrepreneurship Education at school

It is time to build your A- team, people who will execute this.

You have to be very picky and think beyond ordinary.

Think beyond your teachers but in case you have some bright one's, take them along.

Do not shy away from hiring your students to be in the A-team.

Somebody in the neighborhood visiting India for just a few weeks can also be included.

Some retired person, a homemaker, a shopkeeper, a salesman, anyone who has requisite skill set can be invited for executing a particular module.

Now I want to talk about a specific problem in execution

Do not fall for that.

So, usually schools may get the opportunity to invite successful entrepreneurs and they expose their students with them.

It looks good for the optics but the impact is not that great because while it can give motivation but it might not give a lot if learning as students might not have relevant questions. (Some schools even prepare students to ask questions beforehand for such event, how phony?)

So, I would always suggest to host such sessions for your A-team and then in case the speaker is willing to put in more time, one can also interact with students too.

But your job is to improve the skillset of your A-team because these are the people who are going to work longer hours with your students.

So use gratis wisely to build your A-team.

Hope that helps, if you need any help on step 4 or 5 for your school, feel free to contact us and we will be happy to help.

See you next week, where we will talk about how and why you should teach your children to explore their body mind and soul and what does our Shastras say about it?