TAKING THE INITIATIVE
One of the things I love about teaching entrepreneurship is that it is self-initiative incarnate. Teens becoming adults, and inner-city kids disenfranchised from mainstream society, don’t gain when people think and decide for them; they gain when they exercise their decision-making muscle and stimulate their internal motivations. Learning entrepreneurship not only gives them a tangible set of skills that are useful for competing in a dog-eat-dog world; it is also a process or a way of thinking that demands ingenuity and stick-to-it-iveness.
And yet I have been concerned about the advanced students in my after-school youth entrepreneurship program. These are the ten students who we poked and prodded for most of the past year to complete their business plans and prepare for their business presentations, who impressed our panel of judges at our business plan competition and who impressed us over the course of the year with their ideas and their work ethic, enough that we invited them back for a second year and gave them money and office space to run their new ventures.
So whereas the first year is about them attending the classes and learning the materials, this second year is to be about them growing their businesses and making their money. I have purposely not hounded anyone about assignments I pass out, all of which are designed to help the students organize themselves around starting, running, and/or growing their businesses. I have consistently told them instead that the motivation must come from within, that them putting in the time on their businesses wasn’t for me to be happy that they were doing their homework but for them to be happy that they were achieving their entrepreneurial goals.
But these are teens used to a stale educational model that force-feeds them information and asks them to regurgitate it at the end of the week, and that teaches to a standardized test and then hands out that test. Creativity and self-starting have been pounded out of them, replaced by a mechanical approach to teaching and learning. It’s like how sports coaches now dictate everything the players on the field do – swing away, bunt, even throw over to first – rather than letting the players act on instinct.
So what’s happening in our program is that we’ve ramped up the expectations, and at the same time taken away many of the external carrots and sticks. I haven’t chased anyone around to do their work, and a lot of work isn’t getting done.
Fortunately, some of that internal motivation is starting to kick in. We’re showcasing our youth-run businesses in three weeks, and I have stressed that this networking event is for them to make contacts and do business, not for us to look good. So again, I’m not chasing anyone down to get their act together, lest we look bad in front of our sponsors and partners. Instead, the youth themselves are starting to hustle to get ready. They’re using their own carrots and sticks now; the carrot of looking good to their peers and to strangers, and the stick of not wanting to look bad.
So hopefully, this will springboard them to continue to look to a growing internal motivation to put the work in on their business, rather than looking externally for someone to offer them a carrot or prod them with a stick. And maybe, that will mean that they will be becoming more effective entrepreneurs.
One of the things I love about teaching entrepreneurship is that it is self-initiative incarnate. Teens becoming adults, and inner-city kids disenfranchised from mainstream society, don’t gain when people think and decide for them; they gain when they exercise their decision-making muscle and stimulate their internal motivations. Learning entrepreneurship not only gives them a tangible set of skills that are useful for competing in a dog-eat-dog world; it is also a process or a way of thinking that demands ingenuity and stick-to-it-iveness.
And yet I have been concerned about the advanced students in my after-school youth entrepreneurship program. These are the ten students who we poked and prodded for most of the past year to complete their business plans and prepare for their business presentations, who impressed our panel of judges at our business plan competition and who impressed us over the course of the year with their ideas and their work ethic, enough that we invited them back for a second year and gave them money and office space to run their new ventures.
So whereas the first year is about them attending the classes and learning the materials, this second year is to be about them growing their businesses and making their money. I have purposely not hounded anyone about assignments I pass out, all of which are designed to help the students organize themselves around starting, running, and/or growing their businesses. I have consistently told them instead that the motivation must come from within, that them putting in the time on their businesses wasn’t for me to be happy that they were doing their homework but for them to be happy that they were achieving their entrepreneurial goals.
But these are teens used to a stale educational model that force-feeds them information and asks them to regurgitate it at the end of the week, and that teaches to a standardized test and then hands out that test. Creativity and self-starting have been pounded out of them, replaced by a mechanical approach to teaching and learning. It’s like how sports coaches now dictate everything the players on the field do – swing away, bunt, even throw over to first – rather than letting the players act on instinct.
So what’s happening in our program is that we’ve ramped up the expectations, and at the same time taken away many of the external carrots and sticks. I haven’t chased anyone around to do their work, and a lot of work isn’t getting done.
Fortunately, some of that internal motivation is starting to kick in. We’re showcasing our youth-run businesses in three weeks, and I have stressed that this networking event is for them to make contacts and do business, not for us to look good. So again, I’m not chasing anyone down to get their act together, lest we look bad in front of our sponsors and partners. Instead, the youth themselves are starting to hustle to get ready. They’re using their own carrots and sticks now; the carrot of looking good to their peers and to strangers, and the stick of not wanting to look bad.
So hopefully, this will springboard them to continue to look to a growing internal motivation to put the work in on their business, rather than looking externally for someone to offer them a carrot or prod them with a stick. And maybe, that will mean that they will be becoming more effective entrepreneurs.
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