At Lincoln School, one of our strategic priorities over the past several years has been the integration of Entrepreneurial Thinking into the academic and co-curricular programs of the school. Our mission statement talks about things like being the leading innovator of 21st Century education, and having graduates who make a positive impact on society. In other words, at the Lincoln School we hold ourselves accountable for more than just GPAs and college acceptances. We aspire to make a positive impact on the world, and a major component of that work is equipping our students with the skillsets and mindsets necessary to take risks in the service of social innovation and economic development.
That’s why I am excited to dig into the book “Teaching Entrepreneurship: A Practice-Based Approach.” The book was shared as a recommendation from our partners at Babson College and the Lewis Institute – organizations who are well known for their pioneering works developing a practice-based curriculum for teaching entrepreneurship.
In the very first chapter, the authors address the question about how students learn entrepreneurship. The authors’ position is clear, “in order to learn entrepreneurship, one must do entrepreneurship.” Due to the highly dynamic nature of society and economic markets, we have to instill in students both the practices and the mindsets necessary to push for innovative solutions. Again, the authors point out that “entrepreneurial environments are unpredictable, uncertain, and ambigious, and require a specific mindset, which is in stark contrast to the envrionments we teach in.” In other words, classrooms are about the most unsimilar of learning environments for teaching entrepreneurship.
To address this, our learning environments have to change. I’m excited to learn more about what those changes need to look like, but what seems clear is that if we expect our teachers to successfully teach entrepreneurship, they will have to practice entrepreneurship themselves. That is precisely what our teachers are doing. Over 30 of our staff members just completed the Entrepreneurship Program for Innovators and Changemakers (EPIC) curriculum in partnership with the Lewis Institute. Watching our teacher and administrator teams develop venture ideas, develop feasibility studies and business plans, and then pitch those ideas, was transformative – not to mention a lot of fun.
Just like we hold ourselves accountable for preparing our graduates to be successful in the most rigorous academic environments in the world, we want to systematically instill in our graduates the skillsets and mindsets necessary to venture and positively impact their communities. We’re early in our journey, but excited about the transformations we are already experiencing.