Biz Educators  ~>  Teaching Resources  ~>  Next Article  (Turning Interests into Opportunities)

Strategies in 'Trep Training

Entrepreneurship education involves many of the same learning practices used in all classrooms. If your students are to be successful learners, the practices you employ need to be the ones that assist the learning process and increase positive behaviors.

In a 1999 summary entitled Entrepreneurship Success Stories: Implications for Teaching and Learning, Bettina Lankard Brown outlined 10 teaching and learning practices to promote success. These strategies promote high-quality achievement behaviors and skills, higher-order thinking and in-depth understanding. 

Review each of these strategies and consider ways to incorporate them into your classroom. 

• Require in-depth understanding of a concept or issue
• Situate learning in the context of its real-world application
• Provide learning activities that enable students to engage in
  their preferred styles of learning
• Make classrooms student-centered
• Become a coach and mentor rather than a dispenser of knowledge
• Integrate content and context
• Require collaboration and teamwork
• Require students to achieve high intellectual standards
• Engage students in exploration, inquiry, problem solving and reflection

Are you using these strategies? If so, how? Share your ideas with your entrepreneurship colleagues. Write and tell us your story.

In-Depth Understanding 

It is not enough for a student to know how to start a business, or be able to define or recognize marketing. They need to be able to start a business and design and put a marketing plan into action. This requires setting high standards and expectations, no matter how much they may groan. 

When you teach, you're building a scaffold. That scaffold begins at the knowledge level, where students can recall information. The top of the scaffold is the evaluation level. This is where students are able to compare, make choices, and support their reasons for those choices with logical arguments.

Instead of handing out worksheets, require your students to do independent study or research on topics presented in class. Let them get used to working in the real world by getting out and exploring how business works. Encourage and facilitate mentoring relationships. 

Dust off your Bloom's Taxonomy, or visit this website for a refresher: Bloom's Taxonomy Task Oriented Wheel. Now go back to your curriculum, see where the students can dig deeper, and begin using the rest of the strategies to enhance your program.

Back

Real-world Application

Your students need to experience business practices as well as seeing them at work. It's not enough to just read about starting a business - every student should experience the entire process. 

Create assignments that require your students to investigate business practices in the real world. This can include interviews, research reports, surveys, and many other hands-on assignments. 

Contact local owner-operated businesses and ask if you can have a student or two spend a day working with them. Discuss the business concepts you've introduced as well as those you are planning to introduce. Then, have those students report about their experiences to the rest of the classroom. 

Launch a mentorship program. Research shows that mentorship can have long-range beneficial effects. For more information on how to start a mentoring program, check out these sites:

Mentor 2000

The National Mentoring Partnership

Back

Learning Styles

You know that kid who always taps his pencil, and the sound just drives you mad? Instead of stopping him, have him tap on a folded towel to muffle the sound. This student is just engaging in an activity that helps him learn.

Some students need to work independently. Others need to work with groups. Everyone has a different learning style; everyone uses multiple intelligences to absorb information. You can smooth the progress of learning in your classroom by being aware of how your students learn and engaging them in activities appropriate to their learning style. 

Do you know how your students process information? What is your teaching style? The University of Florida has a great website for learning styles. Click here to access it. An excellent site for multiple intelligences can be found here. In addition to basic resources, they've included an M.I. survey you can give to your students as well as teaching strategies for each intelligence.

Back

Make Classrooms Student-Centered

Student-centered classrooms do not have an adult standing in the front of the room lecturing. They have someone who facilitates discussion and discovery. This person will map out a particular learning goal, chart possible courses, then let the learners choose the path they will take. 

Student-centered classrooms do not have worksheets. They do have journals, projects, hands-on activities in a variety of shapes, sizes and flavors, and a host of other opportunities to engage the learner's brain.

Student-centered classrooms do not have rules. They do have guidelines and consequences. The students have the opportunity to make the rules and the consequences. 

For more information please check out The Student Centered Classroom with the Teacher as Guide and Colleague at www.chemistrycoach.com/

Back