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Credit: GenYouth
Education Dive
Preparing students for the future of work: An educator's perspective
A Chicago business and tech teacher describes why it's important to instill an entrepreneurial mindset in today's students.
Angela Miceli
Feb. 14, 2020
How can we, as educators, adequately prepare our students for the
mysterious future of work? The jobs and careers we know today will
either be gone or redesigned by the time current students join the
workforce. It is our job to prepare young people to thrive and achieve
their goals, but when the target is forever moving and technology seems
to be taking over, how can we ensure their success?
The solution is actually very basic and has been around since the
beginning of time: we need to nurture the entrepreneurial mindset. This
is a set of skills that enables people to identify and make the most of
opportunities, overcome and learn from setbacks and succeed in a
variety of settings.
Back in the day, the entrepreneurial mindset may have been referred to
as “soft skills,” but those skills are anything but soft. They are the
foundation for our students’ success both in school and in the
workplace. We seem to have lost focus over the past several years, but
the entrepreneurial mindset is back in fashion and more important than
ever.
Principle components
First, let me identify the principle components of the entrepreneurial
mindset as defined by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, a
nonprofit that teaches business and academic skills through schools and
community partners.
Communication and collaboration
Creativity and innovation
Critical thinking and problem solving
Future orientation
Opportunity recognition
Comfort with risk
Initiative and self-reliance
Flexibility and adaptability
As you can see, none of these characteristics are business-specific,
but are rather everyday necessities. Having an entrepreneurial mindset
is useful whether or not you want to start your own business. Where
will our students be if they are unable to communicate
effectively? What if they cannot identify a problem or solve one
on their own? With technology taking over jobs across all industries,
our students will not have jobs if they cannot be creative and
innovative. So how do we ensure that our students will be successful
after they leave our classrooms?
It is easier than you might think—"think" being the key word
here. We need to force our students to think outside their
comfort zones. We need to encourage our students to get it
totally wrong in a very safe environment. We need to teach the
entrepreneurial mindset in our classrooms.
That sounds difficult and scary, right? It is actually quite achievable
with a project-based approach that introduces the entrepreneurial
mindset in a fun and practical way. This is my seventh year of
implementing the NFTE curriculum in my classroom at Holy Trinity High
School in Chicago. Each year it gets better and better. I promise the
class that everything they do and every assignment they are given is
for a purpose. If they don’t see it immediately, they will by the end
of the class. This pact creates mutual trust between us.
STEM + business
At Holy Trinity, we have a four-year, B-STEM honors program that adds
business to science, technology, engineering and math. Throughout this
program, students are introduced to the practical side of their STEM
courses by incorporating business into the mix.
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