A few weeks ago we closed out our summer entrepreneurship camp experience. We had students from 10 different schools across San Jose join us for the 2-week intensive camp. Students participate in a series of curriculum modules designed in partnership with Babson College, the #1 university in the world for entrepreneurial education. Over the course of 3 years, roughly 3 dozen of our teachers have been certified in the Babson methodology for teaching entrepreneurship, and our summer camp is just one of the ways that we make the experience accessible for our own Lincoln students and others across the country and the region.
The camp experience culminates on the last day with a Rocket Pitch session. Similar to what you might see on an episode of Shark Tank, teams of students walk the audience through a pitch deck in front of a panel of entreprenuerial innovators from the field. After sharing their big ideas, the students receive feedback from members of the panel. At one point, our director of innovation and entrepreneurship leaned over to me to say “they are getting some pretty hard feedback from this panel.” Honestly, that puts a smile on my face.
When it came my turn at the end to share a few words, I went back to this idea of hard feedback. At Lincoln, we’re not just trying to integrate an entrepreneurship curriculum. Yes, we definitely do that. We have key conceptual learnings and projects strategically placed throughout the PreK – 12 continiuum. Students start learning the key concepts from a very young age, with more sophisticated projects and venture competitions as the grow older and advance through the school.
Yet just as important as a deliberate entrepreneurship curriculum, is the development of an entrepreneurial pedagogy. This entrepreneurial pedagogy has found its way into our framework for student-centered instruction, and seeks to integrate instructional practices across all subjects that draw on entrepreneurial skillsets and mindsets. Practices like ideation, rapid prototyping, rocket pitches, and design thinking protocols are just a few of the instructional strategies that we want to see more deeply integrated across the curriculum and grade levels.
As I stood before our audience of students, parents, staff, and guest panel experts, I commented on the value of such an authentic performance assessment, like the rocket pitches students had just completed. Like an athletic contest on the field or a music or dance concert on the stage, the rocket pitch provides students with an authentic audience and real-time feedback on their performance. And that feedback is not just about a grade. Rather, it is valuable information about how to strengthen ideas and projects for real world testing. We’ve already seen students take projects that started in these developmental stages all the way to social and business ventures.
We’re still in the early stages of our entrepreneurial journey, but it is exciting to think about and see how we can develop entrepreneurial curriculum, instruction, and assessments to better prepare our students to make real contributions in the local and global communities that they are a part of.