Entrepreneurship is when you act upon opportunities and ideas and transform them into value for others. The value that is created can be financial, cultural, or social. (Bacigalupo et al., 2016)
The Inquiry
Though there are many models available to support teachers plan and develop units of inquiry learning, most adopt the same core principles of asking the right question (or a series of questions), developing a plan of action, gathering information, synthesising that information, drawing conclusions and reflecting on the process (Audet & Jordan, 2005). Cognitive complexity, therefore, increases as the inquiry unfolds. Inquiry models can be teacher directed (structured), teacher and student directed (guided) or student directed (open) (Lupton, 2017).
“The Pitch” unit of work is a teacher and student directed, guided inquiry. Guided inquiries progress from teacher-guided to student-centred. A teacher will determine the broad weekly/fortnightly focus, for example, identifying opportunities, collaboration or finance, and the student decides what questions need to be asked in the context of their particular business idea. Students are shown different methods for collecting primary data and are taught what good and bad survey questions or interview questions look like, but the responsibility for drafting and executing the interviews and survey’s that are needed to support the information gathering associated with the business idea’s viability is handed to the students. Finally, parent coaches and mentors are involved in the final stages of the term’s work where they collaborate with the students to evaluate the information that has been collected and the research that has been undertaken. Each phase of the course is, in essence, a mini-inquiry where students build on the knowledge and skills taught and apply it to their unique business idea. Collaboration is a recurring theme in this unit of work and adding the coach/mentor phase in the final weeks elevates this inquiry to a transformative level. By drawing on the professional parent community, students will see that in addition to being given a generic set of entrepreneurial skills, they are able to harness this skill-set to transform themselves and/or society (Lupton & Bruce, 2010).
This level of inquiry is consistent with what is expected in senior economics and shows the development of an aspirational skill set for the students.
Many of our students have big thoughts and bold visions but lack the necessary tools or network of contacts required to realise that vision. “The Pitch” unit provides opportunities to develop the entrepreneurial thinking tool-kit and facilitates a dialogue between the students and the people in the community who have lived it. Students complete the unit by undertaking a sharktank pitch to business people in our school community. Presenting the inquiry this way enables students to express themselves uniquely and also teaches them to incorporate their personal aesthetic in a passionate and authentic manner (Lupton & Bruce, 2010).
The Model
“The Pitch” inquiry utilises a design thinking model of inquiry. The iterative nature of design thinking is well suited for dealing with ill-defined or wicked problems (Koh, Chai, Benjamin, & Hong, 2015). Though design thinking is ordinarily associated with STEM and the creation of physical prototypes, the model is equally suited to entrepreneurial thinking. Equally suited to engineering as entrepreneurship, the design thinking model is regarded as creative, fluid, and sensitive to the idea of an improved future. A conceptualisation that Herbert A. Simon’s (1969) described as the “transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones”.
There are many knowledge maps that help visualise a design thinking model for entrepreneurship, but two that have particular value in the context of this unit of work follow. Firstly, the British Design Council‘s double diamond model encapsulates the pedagogical imperative of this unit that entrepreneurial thinking initially requires a divergent thinking phase (identifying problems, looking for solutions, determining a market segment) before a convergent thinking phase (Which idea is best? Should we appeal to mass markets or a niche?). A knowledge map, available on Wikimedia Commons, is reproduced below:
The understand phase requires students to look at the world in a fresh way, notice new things and gather insights. The define stage challenges students to try to make sense of all the possibilities identified in the first phase. Which matters most? Which should they act on first? What is feasible? The goal is to get clarity. The explore phase marks a period of development where solutions or concepts are created, tested using market research and iterated. This process of trial and error helps entrepreneurs improve and refine their ideas. Finally, the create phase is where the resulting product or service is finalised, produced and launched. Throughout the four-stage process, inquiry spirals are evident as fundamental concepts are taught and students seek to build on the knowledge and skills taught and apply it to their unique business idea. Throughout the double diamond, opportunities for students to develop generic skills and contextualised, situated practices will be evident. Furthermore, as students explore and interrogate their entrepreneurial ideas and create solutions, they will be given opportunities to use the transformative and expressive windows (Lupton & Bruce, 2010).
A second inquiry model that informs the teaching and learning of “The Pitch” unit of work is from the Paris d.school is reproduced below:
The alignment story between the models is represented here:
The Questions
“The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions” (Levi-Strauss, 1964)
“The Pitch” unit of work enables students to ask big questions of themselves and their society – questions, McTighe would call, essential questions and Warren Burger would call a beautiful question. These big, broad, open questions are useful for students so that they can begin to see an overview or a purpose to their learning. Essential questions help conceptualise a map of the entrepreneurial space that students will traverse. From these essential questions, generative, evaluative and process questions emerge. The Padlet below explores some relevant questioning frameworks associated with “The Pitch” and identifies the linkages between them.
The windows on the world
The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is. (Proust, 1923)
Inquiry, of the type embodied in “The Pitch” unit of work, provide students with the opportunity to see a subject, their studies or indeed the world around them from different perspectives. The conceptualisation that follows applies “The Pitch” unit of work to the GeSTE windows (Lupton & Bruce, 2010; Lupton, 2015).
Looking through the generic window students are given the opportunity to develop scholarly habits of mind such as defining and describing problems, identifying opportunities, working collaboratively with a team of peers, time management, spreadsheet manipulation (one of my favourites!), designing surveys, analysing survey results, representing findings, interview questioning technique, notetaking, effective search skills, estimation, design, reflection, critical evaluation, problem solving, motivation, finding a vision, thinking fast and slow.
Turning to the situated or contextualised window, students undertaking “The Pitch” unit develop a way of seeing problems through the specific lens of the design thinking and entrepreneurial thinking framework. Students are given opportunities to define problems, observe users, conduct surveys and analyse the results, understand focus groups, deploy assessment criteria, create knowledge maps, use brainstorm design concepts, create character profiles, role-play, manage risk, evaluate and use feedback loops.
The third window onto entrepreneurial thinking is transformative. Opportunities for students to be transformed by their learning, where their preconceived ideas are challenged and the assumptions that underpin their worldview are critiqued, are not always frequent in schools, but they happen to be my favourite teaching areas. “The Pitch” unit offers students the opportunity for a transformative view of self and society in the following ways:
Click on the “next big things I plan to buy” button above 👆. This shows you what individuals in typically developed and typically less developed nations plan to buy next. This is an activity that reveals to students that their conceptualisation of a product or service is entirely relative to their station in life. An entrepreneur in a leafy-green suburb of Brisbane is able to define a very different problem to one in a less developed regional centre or less developed nation. The activity enables students to place themselves on a privilege scale and see that their perception of a solution to a problem hangs fragile assumptions.
Survivorship bias
The cartoonist Randall Munroe drew this comic about the survivorship bias. This bias highlights the error of our cognitive ways because of our tendency to remember the people or things that “made it” and ignoring the silent evidence due to its lack of visibility.
In the context of entrepreneurial thinking, this opens an important transformative window. We gravitate toward the most successful entrepreneurs in the world when we study examples – Bill Gates, Janine Allis, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Anita Roddick. We tend to note that these entrepreneurs have standout qualities like being risk-takers, rogues and rebels. We seldom study entrepreneurs who have those qualities yet failed – those people don’t write books or become household names. There is a factory full of failed entrepreneurs – silent evidence – that is invisible, unheard and unwanted in the dynamic, flashy, winner-takes-all entrepreneurial space.
Finally, the expressive window permits students to pitch their ideas in an idiosyncratic way, exercise their digital imagination by launching their products in a medium of their choosing, feel connected in their team, feel that their voice is being heard, share their vision and passion, work with the wider community by pitching and interrogating ideas with parents and business leaders and, almost incredibly in schools, have fun.
The standards
Even though “The Pitch” unit of work is an eight-week task, the course is couched within a two-year economics and entrepreneurial studies program that enables me to prepare students for the rigours of the new senior accounting and economics senior programs and give them the expertise and skills required to engage fully in their studies. The two-year program provides the opportunity to ensure coverage of the imperatives associated with the Australian Curriculum Economics and Business for Years 9 and 10. Essentially, this permits me to assess “The Pitch” task in a way that is authentic to its design thinking underpinnings where I intend to employ rubric for analysing discipline-based & inter-disciplinary inquiry studies (Galileo Educational Network). This framework will be integrated with the existing QCAA standards elaborations for economics and business studies at Year 9.
The formality and inevitable rigidity of the application of standards for this task is, adopting an ‘essential question’ point of view, moot. The inquiry allows students to hone their entrepreneurial spirit, develop grit, utilise the hive mind of a team, employ design thinking to determine viability, feasibility and desirability of an idea and the build the capacity to navigate ambiguity. The intended learning outcomes of this new unit, therefore, align more closely with 21st-century skills and can’t be sufficiently contained in a standards matrix given the learning and transformation that will take place. In the end, the only question is the one Dylan William would ask: does it change the long-term thinking? Watch this entrepreneurial space…
Reflections of…(the way life used to be)
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Journey to Ithaca 