1.2 Entrepreneurial education in your school/classroom

There are three ways of promoting entrepreneurship education:

• first, by fostering entrepreneurship education through one specific subject;
• second, by adopting entrepreneurial education as a cross-curricular and transversal competence applicable to all subjects;
• third, by thinking of entrepreneurial education as a method rather than an aim.

What is the state of entrepreneurial education in your country/region/school?

In our school, entrepreneurship education is embedded in the school culture, where it is promoted through several actions by all teachers/educators. We believe in entrepreneurial education as a method rather than an aim.

We also adopt a cross-curricular approach, where entrepreneurship education objectives are expressed as being transversal and horizontal, certainly during project days and weeks.

What is entrepreneurship about?

ENTREPRENEURSHIP is about identifying needs and challenges and seize opportunities for creating value.

1.3 Spotting opportunities

I liked the ideas of Ross Hall, Director for Education, Ashoka Europe.

Our school is a changemaker school in that we not only try to spot opportunities. We also try to create opportunities in every situation and to act upon them. We use creativity and imagination to make connections between things.

It is very important to be proactive and to see within existing curricular frameworks and within existing policy obligations opportunities to do something different than the classic “kids in rows”.

In the Padlet, I shared the following answer about ways for my school to support the empowerment of students spotting opportunities:

Irène - Belgium

In my school, we add the subject 'Social activities' to each student's curriculum, during one period a week. Since we are a comprehensive middle school during the first two years of secondary education for 12- to 14-year-olds, students don't have to make a curriculum choice for general, technical or arts education immediately after their primary education. So during the SA-course, we especially invest in learning activities, developing entrepreneurial skills which support their study curriculum choice and their career planning.

1.4 Stimulating learners’ creativity and value creation

Entrepreneurship is about creativity.

I was reminded of the interesting activity 'the 30 circle challenge', thanks for that. I'll integrate it in a planned future project for our pupils. I wrote about it in the Padlet.

Irène - Belgium

I adore activities stimulating 'out-of-the-box-thinking' like this and link this idea with the previous one about considering a problem from another perspective. Our students will have their say in the project 'upgrading of the playground: creating a 'silent' zone'. We'll ask them to draw their 'ideal' zone. It will be a paper with circles we'll give them...

I liked the activity of ‘reverse thinking’. Instead of adopting the logical, normal manner of looking at a challenge you reverse it, and think about opposite ideas. For instance if I want to find ways to lose weight, I might ask myself the question “how can I put on more kilos?”.

And Sir Ken Richardson's speech about creativity in education will always be inspiring.