Wildfire Education

In this episode, Doris talks with Michael Hudecek of St. Clair Superior Development Corporation. He shares his “overwhelming success” in piloting Korda’s model in one of Cleveland’s most impoverished neighborhoods. 

Doris: Okay. Hey, Michael, how are you doing?

Michael: I’m doing great. It’s good to see you again, Doris.

Doris: It’s great to see you. It’s been such a short time and such a long time since I last saw you.

Michael: It was an intense six weeks we just experienced.

Doris: Yeah, how did it go? How did it go?

Michael: It was overwhelmingly successful.

Doris: That’s awesome.

Michael: You know, that comes with a large caveat of, tons of trials and tribulations and it wasn’t perfect. But for year one, we left just overwhelmed at how wildly successful this experiential learning program is.

Doris: Talk about the success. Who were the kids? How was it successful?

Michael: The students all came from two schools in our service district. A little background about myself, my name is Michael Hudecek and I work for St Clair Superior Development Corporation. And this is, to my knowledge, the first CDC run foray into urban entrepreneurship for youth, so we’re sort of treading new water, none of us are experienced educators and the students came from Nexus Academy, which is an e-learning high school. The kids spend half their time in the classroom and half of their studies happen at home. And then one of the students goes to St. Martin de Porres, which is actually who hosted us for the summer.

Doris: So they’re kids from public schools.

Michael: Nexus is a charter school and St. Martin de Porres is a private Christian-run school, actually, a really interesting model.

Doris: Yeah, it’s a really interesting model. It’s awesome. And the neighbor, could you talk for a moment about the neighborhood.

Michael: Yes, so the St. Clair neighborhood runs from about East 30th to Martin Luther King and from the lake to Payne. So it’s the near east side, roughly the same geographical location on the east side of town as Gordon Square is on the west, so proximity to downtown is really quite amazing. It’s probably the most genuinely diverse neighborhood in the city. There’s a large Asian population. It’s predominantly African-American, but there is an old Slovenian neighborhood so there’s a lot of leftover ethnic neighborhood. They hold Kurentovanje in that service district every year, which is a huge Slovenian Easter time celebration.

Doris: And just very briefly, because I was very excited about this, you said you’re not educators and it’s an economic development corporation and you decided to do this class because your goal is…?

Michael: We really wanted to provide access to entrepreneurship to kids in our neighborhood. The Cleveland Flea was started by our CDC and has grown wildly and not without our help, or without our help largely in recent years, and residents weren’t getting opportunities to access them. So we first started trying to do some stuff with adults and then realized that for actual change to take place, we needed to reach kids sooner. Not that adults can’t learn entrepreneurship, but besides learning entrepreneurship, which hopefully will create new businesses in the future, it’s really just amazing life skills, soft skills as a lot of people like to call them, financial responsibility, you name it, and the thing that piqued our interest about your program, specifically, is it’s sort of project-based learning, teamwork, and not the usual lemonade day, park on a corner, sell ten bucks worth of lemonade and pat yourself on the back.

Doris: Yeah, and yeah.

Michael: We’re just trying to do something new and different and attack it in a different way than normal.

Doris: So you did your first pilot.

Michael: Yeah, we just finished our first six-week course, we had five students and it was really amazing. We worked with two businesses in our service district. The first one is Upcycle Parts Shop, which is another program that we run at St. Clair Superior Development Corporation. They’re what’s known as a creative reuse center, so they divert waste materials from residential, industrial, and commercial sources, and then resell it as art supplies as well as doing community art programming. And then our second business was APE MADE, which is a local screen printer, she does mostly clothing and apparel screen printing. And then for our final project, we were gonna have a third business but we decided to let the students try out their hand at starting their own and when we get to that, they had a really amazing concept which blew us away at the end of the day.

Doris: Oh, yeah? What was it?

Michael: So they wanted to launch a gym because they recognized there was a gym desert. If you look at a Google Map of where gyms are in the neighborhood, you see tons of gyms downtown and tons of gyms in the heights. But the crescent moon that sort of shapes those areas, mostly impoverished regions don’t really have access to gyms. The major component was childcare, which they highlighted from getting out and talking to people, and then a lot of those people work all day, they don’t have time to go home and feed the kids, find a babysitter, go back to the gym and come back. So it was really cool to see them identify a need and try and solve it.

Doris: That’s awesome. Talking about if you had to net out the growth you saw on the kids from the start to finish as a result of your pilot, how would you describe it?

Michael: Totally different people.

Doris: Wow.

Michael: Most of them were shy to begin with, some of them were ace students and totally, you know, brilliant by traditional test-taking standards but hated public speaking. As you said frequently this summer, wanted you to have an answer for them, and by the end of it, the weakest, again by traditional standards, air quotes, you can’t see at home, was probably the strongest kid in the room. He was confident, despite the fact that he was the youngest, he was 14 and everyone else, he was going to be a sophomore, everyone else was gonna be a senior, he excelled at every turn and the girl, he was the only boy, the girls kept chiding him for being young and immature, and he was the one who, when you gave him a task, came back to you with concrete information.

Doris: That’s awesome.

Michael: The ace students were finding reasons why they didn’t need to keep going and he was like, “Oh, I found this cool thing.” And he wasn’t braggadocios about it. He just sort of presented it matter-of-factly and really blew me away.

Doris: That’s awesome. What do you think, so when, you know, we talk to educators after they’ve implemented and we talk about those skills, creative problem solving, critical thinking, all that stuff. But if I had to pick one, the one that every student universally says first and most generally, is confidence. Would you agree?

Michael: Hands down, yeah. Being able to sit in a room, actually, the funder from Burton D. Morgan, who funded us, made it to the final presentation. So he was in the room, our executive director was there, some of our staff, and they had, you know, six or seven people in suits show up for their final presentation. There was some tragic circumstances, they lost a lot of days preparing, some team members were out for large stretches of that, and in the last 36 hours, they pulled it together, put an amazing show on and blew everybody out of the water. So it was just one of those, you know, when you’re down and out, you pick yourself up and keep going. And I think it was the trials that they had in the first two rounds that really gave them the confidence to pull it out at the end.

Doris: Yeah, so that’s, I think that’s really important. There are a lot of programs, a lot of programs where what you did in the final part of your class and what we do in the final part of ours, is the entire class. Choose something you care about, create a business model. I have found the same thing that having them work on someone else’s specific problem first allows them to learn. Talk about that.

Michael: There’s just so much from an entrepreneurship standpoint and the reasoning and logic that the students don’t know when they get going, so again, as someone who hasn’t been doing this very long, as an outsider, it just seems like the leap from, “I know nothing,” to, “I’m gonna start this business, that means a lot to me,” is just putting too much on their shoulders in too small of amount of time. And having a concrete single identifiable problem instead of, “I’m gonna change this world because there’s a need that I see”, allows them to focus and learn some basic tenets that they can use later on. That again at the end, they don’t necessarily know they’ve been taught, they just had to learn because they needed to solve this problem. So it was just really great to see them tackle it and then by having multiple iterations, grow the problem a little bit, take on more responsibility and they’ll tell you this, they didn’t think in the middle of the second one that they were gonna be able to do it. The same way in the middle of the first one, they say, “Oh, well we tackled the first one, we can do this. We’re stressed out but I know we can do this.” And then again in the third one, “Well, I guess we made it through that second one, there’s no way we can’t finish this one.”

Doris: That’s awesome.

Michael: So based on your concept of sort of like growing the responsibility as they come along through the program and expanding what they’re required to respond to is really helpful I think for their growth.

Doris: So, Michael, you’ve never taught before this.

Michael: I spent six weeks in Costa Rica teaching ESL. But it was a drastically different environment, teaching ABC’s and one-two-three’s to six year olds.

Doris: So talk about what it was like before, during and now, to teach as a teacher.

Michael: I think the most amazing part for me was that I felt like I was on a parallel track with the students and we had a lot in common through the whole process. They kept saying how, “We haven’t done this.” And I said, “Neither have I, you know, we’re failing together, this is great.”

Doris: That’s awesome.

Michael: And I think the confidence as an educator improved greatly as well. At each step, I became more confident along the way and I think as someone who never did this and as a non-educator, you kept saying, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, you’ll be fine, you just got to do it.” And as I was leaving the workshop with four days to go, I was panicking and thinking, “Okay, well, we don’t have any more time so this is just gonna have to work out.” And to your credit, it really did. Just showing up and going through the motions and trying to stay one step ahead and connecting TED Talks and news articles and different workshops that we could do in class with the work they were doing on the business, just was great for everybody, including me. I mean, I still watch a TED talk at least once a day now as a result of it. It was just something that I enjoy as an adult. And I think to get away from the education standpoint, it’s something that we’re trying to use in our organization. We’re actually trying to get together an office wide project. A lot of our work tends to be siloed and so we’re trying to tackle a neighborhood project in 2017 that none of us like is responsible for, but that we identify as a need. So we’re sort of taking this experiential learning back home.

Doris: That’s awesome. Are you gonna use any of the stuff that we do in the class?

Michael: Yeah, it is predicated on that model entirely.

Doris: That’s awesome.

Michael: So it’s gonna be really cool, and I think that it’s a great reminder as adults and professionals that we shouldn’t pretend that we know everything and stop growing as people. So this has really been great for me. And at the final presentation, the day before was our annual meeting and I had to give a speech and I hate public speaking and it was great to be able to tell these kids. “I was up last night, making my own slide deck, I’m 33 years old, I still don’t like doing it, I wish I was you right now, because 15 years from now you’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s easy, I don’t, you know, it doesn’t stress me out.’” So it was just really cool to be on these parallel tracks with the students. So anybody, at any level of their life, should experience this once, whether as an educator or somebody on the other side.

Doris: Yeah, and to your point about TED talks and there are so many things that are part of this model that, if you bring them in to your work, are fantastic, collaborate, you know, better collaborators bringing the rest of the world into what you do.

Michael: Absolutely. And just thinking creatively about every problem, there are so many different ways to look at the world and it’s easy to get stuck in the one that you’re in because that’s what you do and it’s how you do it. And the more opportunities to shock yourself with these different mindsets, it’s amazing, if you’re paying attention, how much applicable reasoning and logic can be brought in…

Doris: Yeah, we talked…

Michael: Unrelated fields.

Doris: Unrelated fields. We talked right before your first day of class and you were mapping out your plans for the, remember, for the first days, and you just said something now about staying one step ahead, which is before I didn’t think you understood that totally, you were nervous about making sure you had something to do every day, but clearly, now you have a different perspective on that.

Michael: Definitely. I think it’s hard too, your tendency is to wanna plan and decide what’s gonna happen.

Doris: Per minute.

Michael: And for like the students who want an answer, there’s no answer. They’re gonna get stuck on one thing tomorrow, and then two days later, it’s gonna be something you didn’t even see coming necessarily, and so you just have to be thinking, “What might they be having trouble with and how can we try and figure it out?” And to be honest, a lot of times I didn’t figure it out right away and it took me a week, and then all of a sudden, it was like, “Okay, this is what I’m doing wrong. This is how we’re gonna implement it.” And I’m sure sometimes I didn’t really nail it. But I…

Doris: Oh, yeah, sure. That’s all right.

Michael: To your point, like I just had to do it and I’ve done it and I’m already thinking about next summer, how are we gonna do things differently?

Doris: How great is that?

Michael: It’s been really phenomenal and everyone at St. Clair is really grateful for it. The opportunity to go through the workshop and the fact that you’re championing this model for anyone and the fact that it’s open access and you’re trying to just get this way of thinking out in the world, I think that’s important for the youth of America.

Doris: That’s great. That’s great. And you knew, one of the things, you mentioned at the beginning, everybody talks about these soft skills and I’ve decided not to use that term anymore. The reason is that in my travels I’d found that people are, there’s something about “soft” skills that devalues it and actually I really think the skills we’re talking about are the hardest ones to develop, they’re harder to develop than learning, memorizing my whatever and they’re… Talk about the skills that you’ve seen these students develop. And what you think they’re leaving this one summer program better equipped with as they head out?

Michael: The ability to work in teams, I think is probably the biggest improvement for all the students when we were doing the first challenge. And even to some degree, when they were solving their own problem, they tended to wanna break up the work and say, “I’m doing this part and you’re doing this part,” and getting them to say, “We’re doing this and I’m helping work on this. But if I need help, I can talk to you,” I think was really important. And again, drawing parallels to our office place, a lot of times, as adults, we forget that when we’re in a group, whatever organization it is, you have talented people all around you and being able to ask for help is something that’s not really encouraged later in life. You’re supposed to have all the answers. So it’s really great for kids to recognize early and often that asking for help is good and helpful, and various ideas are good and helpful.

Again, the confidence presenting in front of people, the confidence in having an idea and not coming up to me and saying, “I have this idea. Is this even the realm of okay?” And by the end, they’re throwing crazy ideas out there and if I say no, they come back five minutes later with a new one. It’s not, “Oh man, you shut me down, this is the end of the day, I’m done.” It was, “Oh, okay, well, let me see what, why that didn’t work and come back to you later.” And so the confidence to fail confidently, I think, is the biggest one outside of, you know, again asking questions and teamwork.

Doris: I love that. It’s so funny because you come out of having done it and these are all different schools, they’re all different courses, different programs, different sets of students and everybody comes out of this saying the same things, right, about what these students have gotten out of it, and I call it substantive confidence because I think of it as, it’s not of the empty, “Oh honey, you’re great. Let’s make sure everybody gets a ribbon whether they won or not.” It’s the confidence that comes from knowing, “I can navigate complexity, whether it’s relationships, problems, situations, I know I can navigate.” Failing badly and picking yourself up, “I have confidence that I will be able to navigate whatever is in front of me.” And that is so important for students going out into this particular day and age.

Michael: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.

Doris: So what’s next for you?

Michael: So we are regrouping for next summer. This is part of like a three-part program. So we’re actually in the midst of planning a pitch competition for the fall. We have some funds to hopefully start a small company in the neighborhood, so we’re excited about that, and we’re working on getting that together now. We’re actually using Flipgrid as our entry point so it’s been great to integrate that technology. My wife is pregnant and we’re due in like a month.

Doris: Congratulations. That’s exciting.

Michael: Thank you. So we figured Flipgrid was an easy way for them to get their first 90-second pitch in there and then we’ll do a more intense follow-up once I’m back from paternity leave.

Doris: That’s great. And next summer, what are your plans for next summer?

Michael: Next summer, we’re coming back better than ever, hopefully, now that we’ve got one under our belt. I definitely wanna have more students. I think having the opportunity to have different teams, not only to mix personalities and provide different experiences working in teams, but also to have that little competitive edge of one-upping your fellow students.

Doris: Yeah, I have to congratulate you because people might think having a small cohort to start with is a really lucky, great, easy thing. It actually makes it more difficult because there’s a natural energy that comes from having multiple teams. If one team’s kind of stuck, they’ll look over their shoulder, the other teams going at it, and I think it’ll be so interesting to see how your experience is different as your class size grows.

Michael: Yeah, we found even just as the teachers, we stepped out a lot. There was so little for us to do every little bit that it felt suffocating to be in the same room with the students because they kept looking over their shoulder, feeling like we were judging them. So Aiden, who was interning with us this summer, a student from Hawken, and I would just leave for hours at a time and just say, “When do you want us to come back? Well, you know, you have until you need some help, if you have any questions, we’re across the hall.”

Doris: So that’s funny, the first, the reason in the Toolkit we give you the first full three weeks mapped out is that because they come in passive, wanting you to tell them everything, we find that these structures and teaching them the methodologies and all that stuff in the first stretch of the class is really important, but over time, they have the tools, they have the skills and they’re applying them, so there is more, later in the class, more time for the instructors to be out of the room.

Michael: Yeah, you’re just sort of shepherding them back to whatever direction you need them to go, but they’re doing all the work. I can’t say enough about the amount of time they put in both at home and in class, on their own accord. I mean, we were very flexible and told them, “You know, if you wanna go home, we can go home.” And more often than not, they said, “Oh, let’s stay.” Or, “Let’s go do some more interviewing.”

Doris: So if there are people listening who are thinking about trying something like this but intimidated and a lot of people do get intimated because it’s so weird, what would you say to them?

Michael: I would say, just do it. Start tomorrow. Don’t wait six weeks, don’t wait 12 months. The amount of time, so we started talking about this in February and we didn’t start implementing it until mid-June, and I spent so much energy on stuff that was a waste of time having gone through it once. Just like trying to plan and prepare and thinking about what’s gonna be perfect and there is no perfect.

Doris: No, there isn’t.

Michael: Just get one under your belt and you kept saying that this summer, and you know, having not gone through, you say, “Well, yeah, but there’s gotta be like something you can give me.” Wanting that answer that doesn’t exist. You know, it’s like this desire to have a path.

Doris: Yeah, so we’ll give you the toolkit, you’ll have a starting point, and just go to town.

Michael: Go to town.

Doris: Nice.

Michael: Let them have at it.

Doris: Michael, congratulations. I’m so excited for your students, past and future.

Michael: Thank you. Yeah, we can’t wait to do it again and we really couldn’t have done it without the support of you and your team. So thank you all.

Doris: Oh, nice. Okay, so we’re gonna keep going because I just, we ended the podcast session and Tim turned off the mics and you just started saying some stuff that I really want everybody to hear. So I listened to you, knowing the kinds of kids you’re working with, and my heart is just full thinking about what you just did this summer. And if you could talk a little bit about the kids you worked with.

Michael: Yeah, I mean as I was just saying off mic earlier, poverty is just really hard. I think one of the biggest struggles we had was just the effects of uncertainty in your life at every turn, for people especially that young, deaf sisters leaving their kids with them for emergency daycare, transportation issues, lack of money, you name it. Every turn, when things seemed like they were on a course for smooth sailing to get to the end, something tragic would arise and somebody would have to be out for a day or two. And of course, it’s not a fault, no one’s mad at anybody. You have to reassure them that it’s okay and that no one’s mad. But it’s just a reminder of one, how important this opportunity is. Many of the kids…I don’t remember if we talked about this on the mic earlier…left saying how grateful they were that they had skills that they wouldn’t have had otherwise and how they’re gonna have it later in life.

Doris: So the kids already got that.

Michael: Yeah, just saying, “I don’t wanna, you know, I don’t wanna be done at high school, I wanna go to college, I wanna be a nurse, and having these skills under my belt now will be really grateful. Like I didn’t, admittedly, I didn’t wanna be here.” Some of the kids were supposed to be in another program and we tugged them back and they were crestfallen and then found that they really were enjoying it and were grateful for the opportunity. But our end goal, I think we were talking about too, is not to be the ones administering this program every year. It’s not that we don’t love doing it, my experience was amazing, but we hope to get teachers at the schools where the students we’re reaching or coming from, to recognize that, if I can do it with no background in education and practically no resources, somebody with an entire institution behind them can be having a much greater impact than Michael Hudecek can be with 5 or 10 or 15 students.

Doris: Yeah, and if we get this amidst what we’re trying to do, we don’t want these to be add-on weekend summer programs. We want all students to have, develop these kinds of skills in school classes.

Michael: Yeah, and that’s where we’re hoping to get at, too. So we are hopefully championing your cause on a very small scale.

Doris: Well, and you know, we’re here to help anybody who wants to do it.

Michael: And she means that. People listening at home, if you talk to Doris and you have a question, she will get back to you as soon as she possibly can, so don’t be shy if you have a question, and if she says, “Call me,” she means it.

Doris: Well, and we can give you a starter kit. I think that’s also, thank you for saying that, I think. I think that the big thing that teachers need to know if they wanna try this is we give you a starter kit with step…

Michael: Yeah, the toolkit’s immensely helpful to get off the ground.

Doris: Right. So you can just have something to try and it’s right there in front of you. You said something about, you talked about the kids who went to the wrong place. I thought that was really interesting the first day.

Michael: Yeah, we worked with Youth Opportunities Unlimited, which is a local sort of first job organization. They give young students between 14 and 19 summer employment. They make minimum wage. They show up, most of the jobs are manual labor or nominal tasks around for organizations that are usually nonprofits and don’t have the funds to pay for the extra help they need in the summer. And so, we partnered with them and the students were actually getting paid, but due to some administrative things, they ended up at the wrong site, which was a teen center and all their friends were there and they were so excited to be just learning about hip-hop and muraling and gardening and doing all this amazing fun stuff in the summer, and they showed up and I told them that they were basically in school again for six weeks. But it was nothing like school, which they did not believe, when I told them that.

Doris: So they were not happy that first day.

Michael: They were really unhappy and within 48 hours, they were the ones who were most excited and were saying, “Thank you so much for making us leave, we know we fought you on it but this is the best thing we could have done for six weeks. We can hang out with these kids for the next nine months at school, but we can’t ever get this back.”

Doris: And why do you think they thought it was good that they were gonna be returning to school?

Michael: They recognized immediately that the public speaking skills, the ability to work in teams, the confidence they were getting from it, and the ability to tackle a challenge that they felt completely unprepared for, was inside them the whole time, and that they didn’t need to judge themself against other people anymore because they had it all the time and they just needed somebody to say, “You can do this.” And force them to actually do it.

Doris: Yeah, that was the most beautiful thing, we’re gonna end on that note. Okay, thanks.

Alison: Hey, Doris.

Doris: Hey, Alison.

Doris: I’m great.

Alison: Yeah, I’m feeling pretty great, too. Wrapping up Season 3…

Doris: Yeah. It’s been an incredible journey. What an adventure and what an amazing thing to have all these educators with such important and interesting and inspiring things to say and have their voices and their ideas captured. It’s been extraordinary.

Alison: I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I felt really honored, from a production side of this season to be able to highlight these educators in ways that…you know, they’re not usually getting that recognition.

Doris: Yeah, I don’t think teachers do, absolutely. We’ve talked about it that a lot. They don’t.

Alison: Right. They’re inside their classroom and they don’t have that kind of spotlight usually.

Doris: That’s right. And it was your idea to call this season the “Firestarters.” And I loved it when you first said it. I knew that was right and I love it even more now, because, really, that’s what everything we’re talking about is all about. It’s about how do you make system change when you have a system that is entirely wrong, which I believe is the case with our education system created in the 19th century. How do you make systems change?

And it starts with, whether it’s a school or a public school district or another country, it starts with a brave risk-taking person who says, “We need to do this in a completely different way and I’m willing to step off the ledge and take a huge risk to do something completely differently with students in a classroom, in a school.”

And people who aren’t in schools, I don’t think can really grasp how difficult that is to do. And, because there are people, educators, who are brave and courageous and will put themselves in harm’s way in order to do this, we have now schools all over the world that are changing their practice in ways that changes the lives for their students.

Doris: That’s right. You know, it’s interesting. We are at the same time as we’ve been creating Season 3 and having all these conversations. We’ve also been creating a new organization, a nonprofit, where we’re doing this work. And there are organizations now all over the world and growing numbers who are organizing around this work, how do we help schools? How do we change the education system so that we’re better preparing kids?

But none of it works. None of that will make a dent if we don’t have teachers and administrators inside schools willing to take the risk and also put an incredible amount of energy and effort into trying something new and then building something new. And that’s really what we’ve had here. We’ve had conversation after conversation with educators, heads of schools, principals, teachers of all types in all kinds of schools, who are raising their hand to say, “I’ve got to do something differently here.”

And then we have teamed with them to help them so they have a starter kit, so they don’t have to build everything from scratch themselves, that’s really what we’re doing here. And then they take the starter kit, they try it out inside the class, inside the school, not with a spotlight, not creating a brand new big program, just try it out. And the minute they do, they see for themselves, “This is better. This is doing school better.”

And from there, they take it. It gives them even more courage to change over time everything, what they do and how they do it. And we’ve been seeing that these Firestarters, the ones, you know, I may have worked with, four years ago, like Jeremy in the last episode. And he comes in as a science teacher, and four years later, wow, listen to the program which is entirely DSST Public School’s program. That is their program that they’ve created and is growing like crazy. But it has to start with one educator somewhere inside a school who raises their hand and says, “No, I’m not doing this any more like this. We are not doing… I will put myself out there.”

I imagine that most of the people who listen to this podcast are educators themselves. And to the educators, when they hear us talking like this, they completely understand what I’m saying. For those not in education, I want to linger on this point because I don’t think there is an industry out there that is as change-averse and risk-averse in how it’s set up as the education industry. I really don’t.

And to make change from within and not only make change, but to use our favorite word, radically different, radically different approach, inside a system where all eyes and all operations and everything we do is set up to evaluate the students and you and the school using completely different measures and priorities, to stand up and say, “I’m gonna try something radically different and it doesn’t fit into any of the norms that this system has been guided by” is a really brave thing. They are Firestarters.

Alison: And it’s spreading. That, it’s contagious. We’ve seen it, that when one person is having results like that, the others in their institution feel more courageous, feel like it’s not as risky for them to start trying something new like that. And I’m always a firm believer in, kind of, that inside-out approach to change and to know that we’re having traction in the education industry is incredible. I mean, it’s so calcified, like we always say.

Doris: Well, and it’s because…the reason that happens that after one teacher or administrator does one pilot using these methods, it’s inevitable that one year, two years, three years later, it’s had a ripple effect. You know, well, like wildfire. The reason is, this is better. It’s just better, and it’s better for kids and there’s no arguing with it.

And, you know, as you hear me say so often, what teachers have in common is they all chose kids as their life’s work. So if you aren’t too jaded by having done it for too long inside the system, if you still have that little thing inside you which I think educators do, this is, “Oh yeah, kids. This is about kids.” Then when you implement a pilot and use these methods that are radically different and you see the results in your students, you can’t go back. And when others in the building see those students, they are compelled to try something different.

Alison: And we’ve seen it now. So we had, in this whole season, 62 educators represented who really embodied all that you’re talking about. They were across 20 states, 7 countries, impacting students in all those areas, which, I mean, it really is even more motivating. You know, to do this work is something that’s inspiring day-to-day for me and to start to see this now scaling in this way is more than I could have hoped for.

Doris: You know, we have kind of an amazing collection in Season 3. We’ve worked at having sort of a little bit of everything. But every story is different and if it were up to me, we would just continue to have these conversations. They’re extraordinary and they’re inspiring and they’re all different. Every teacher, every educator is themselves a designer. They’re designing the learning experience of their students. So everyone is unique. And as we continue to work with more and more educators in more and more countries in more and more schools, I wish we could just have these conversations all the time.

Every one of them is interesting. I’m never ever bored by hearing what these educators are doing and how they’re using these methods to then create as a starter, you know, as an igniter. And then how they’re shaping their programs themselves, it’s really cool.

And, you know, we’ve talked about this but it’s impossible to listen to this without understanding that we’re not just talking about transforming the kids. We’re talking about transforming the adults. The adults are getting transformed in beautiful ways. It’s like being in this system or in this line and you’ve just been told to get in line, keep marching, don’t get out of line, don’t talk, da da da, and then somebody says, “Wait, wait.” And they step out of line and they do their thing. They get to be themselves and they never go back in that line. And that’s really what the season, I think, is all about.

Alison: Yeah. I think there were some common themes that we saw that were to your point around taking risks and being brave. We heard people talking about this idea of Deschooling, not only the students, but themselves, to that point, where they felt like it was a rewiring of the way they were approaching their work and their impact.

We heard about this idea of leaders in their school really creating a space for them. You’ve been saying creating the conditions lately, which is a helpful way to put that, so that there’s space for these educators to be creative and come up with new types of programs.

Doris: And to experiment. It isn’t just organic, actually. What’s happening is you have to have the leadership of whether it’s a school or the district, but at some point, it’s the school building. You have to have the leadership in the school who has the will to create the conditions so that the experimenting and the innovating, you know, the now overused word, can happen. That’s really important for people to understand. It isn’t just about a teacher in a classroom deciding, “This is wrong. I want to do it differently.” That’s a necessary ingredient but without the leadership, it just doesn’t happen.

Alison: Absolutely true. And, I think, as well these schools, when you talk about, you know, innovation is a buzz word that a lot are using and, you know, same with skill building, and these are things that people are paying a lot of lip service to. But they are, in their implementation, falling short in a lot of ways. And so to really see how these educators, with the help of their leadership, have been embedding this inside their schools so that their students are learning the skills so that they’re coming out impacting their communities by solving problems with businesses or other community leaders. You know, I think it’s really powerful.

Doris: Yeah, I agree. And the methods are really important. Without having methods for educators to take and use, methods that have been developed over the course of years and literally, by now, thousands of students, everybody has to…

Alison: By you.

Doris: Well, but everybody has to start by scratch. And there are lots and lots of teachers who are starting from scratch and they’re doing fabulous things. But if we want to really create a new education system, we have to have some practices that have been developed over time with some shared principles and some shared approaches. It doesn’t mean every, like…You know, I don’t want an education system where there’s a single method or single practice. Of course not.

But what we’re talking about are some very basic needs of a teacher. When wanting to create something new, “How do I design the curriculum? What do I have to think about most when I do that? And then are there some things others have already developed that I can use to test drive this? And then what is the actual teaching of it? What does it look like minute to minute in the actual classroom with the kids? I’ve got four walls. I’ve got 35 kids in front of me. I know how to do what I’ve been doing that last 20 years. What the heck do I do with these 35 kids in my 45 minutes every day?”

And for this kind of innovation to happen well and in a healthy way, there has to be some methodology as a starting point that people can take advantage of. And that’s really a big part of what we’ve been doing, of course. But then, when you listen to these podcasts, they’re all completely different. They’re not all entrepreneurship classes.

They’re, in fact, as you know, this is a massive thing because six years ago, when I started entrepreneurship class, for years, I had such a hard time with the baggage of assumption. “Oh, it’s a marketing class.” “Oh, it’s about how to make money.” “Oh, it’s about…” No, this is about doing school differently. And when you listen to these podcasts, you can’t go into these podcasts thinking, “Oh, but this is okay for an entrepreneurship class or an extracurricular or whatever.”

You can’t listen to what these teachers have done inside core academic classes and what impact it’s had, the results. You can’t listen to that and come out the other side and say, “Yeah, it’s not rigorous. It’s a cool thing over here.” No, this is about changing the way we do school entirely.

Alison: This right. So to say the least, it has been an inspiring season and we hope you listeners found it useful. We are going to be taking a break here over the holidays but we will be back in the new year with Season 4. In the meantime, be courageous, take some risks and try to ignite some change at your school.

Doris: That’s right.

Doris: Hello, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Hi, Doris.

Doris: I am so excited for this conversation, I met you four years ago. You were a science teacher. I’d like you to introduce yourself, and your program, now that you’re the Director of Entrepreneurial Studies.

Jeremy: Sure. My name is Jeremy Wickenheiser and I currently at DSST Public Schools, which a public chatter network located in Denver, Colorado. We currently have 13 schools of mix up middle schools, and high schools, serving approximately 5,300 students. And the Entrepreneurial Studies program we built and designed is currently being implemented in two high schools, one middle school in our network in the school-based that’s approximately 600 students. And we also have different kind of summer programming for both, you know, current students, alumni. And then we have kind of capstone experience that involved international travel and those kinds of pieces.

And then we’re also increasingly starting to work with the educators actually within our network to bring this kind of learning into their kind of core content classes, if you will. Because a lot of what we do is actually, I believe, is very much of framework of learning that can be applied to any sort of content that it just so happens that we’re using entrepreneurship as a vehicle to deliver these critical skills. But you can very easily do that in your statistics class or your biology class, or what-have-you. And we’re increasingly working with teachers in our network to do so.

Doris: Phenomenal. I’d love for our listeners to hear a bit about you, Jeremy, and about why you do this. Why are you so passionate about this?

Jeremy: Right. So, I grew up in a really small town in Northern California, went to UC Santa Barbara, where I got a degree in creative studies with an emphasis in biology. Then I went ahead and joined Teach for America, taught on the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas, four years. And then came up to DSST Public Schools here in Denver, Colorado, where I currently teach. And DSST Public Schools is a charter network that was founded in 2004, built on the idea of, how do we create inclusive schools that, you know, foster, I would say, diversity or also providing a high-quality liberal arts focused, STEM-focused education that all students can access while emphasizing values as well.

So, my path, in terms of teaching was since I studied biology in college, I taught a lot of different science courses, built a solar car engineering program. And then when I came to DSST, I started at our first high school and taught biology and what would be the equivalent of an AP biology course. And then I helped to open our second high school where I taught physics for the first two years, then I looped up and taught AP biology, and regular biology with our students. And then kind of that’s the time when we kind of started to foray into this space of entrepreneurial studies.

And so, you know, for me I started to really, think could be a vehicle for developing these critical skills if, you will, because, you know, one of the things that I see in terms of education is, I think it’s about finding an equal balance between academic and support and competencies. But then also at the same time to giving students the space and time to both ask and answer the questions, you know, things like, “What I’m I put on this earth to do? Like what is my why? What is it that I care so deeply about?”

Because, I think, especially when you look at young people today, I would say, more so than any time previously, they care super deeply about finding a career where they find meaning and purpose in that, more than just collecting a pay check. And, I think, then that’s where…That, you know, became for me kind of my mission and purpose, you know, is in that way, right? To help young people today. I would say, find their talents and gifts and help them think about how they’re going to uniquely use that to create the deepest impact that they can.

Doris: I love the way you said that. So, what has this meant for the students at DSST?

Jeremy: So one of the things that DSST has done since it’s opened is 100% of our students have been accepted in four year universities. You know, but we know that, you know, that’s not enough. It’s not enough just to be…I think some people say, “That’s enough.” But it’s not enough just to be accepted to college. Right now, I would say, our network is really shifted in terms of how we think about that and it’s, you know, much more so about, how do we actually help all of our students to be able to graduate from college.

And, you know, I’ve had the opportunity to have conversations with people all over the city, and, I would say in terms of education, and then also in terms of higher education, and I’m thinking, you know, in the business communities. And, I think, there’s a couple of things that really stick out. You know, first, I think, the reality is, there’s a really big disconnect between K-12, higher ed and then the business community in the sense that when you look statistically, there’s data out there that says, “94% of the Chief Academic Officers from universities believe that they’re doing a good job, preparing students for careers post-college. But then on the flip side of it, only 11% of CEOs and hiring managers believe that to be true.” And that’s like a massive gap, right? And so that’s confirmed. I mean, when I talk to people they’ll tell me time and time again like, “Yes, you know, students even after coming out of college have all these academic content. Maybe they took, you know, a degree in computer science, whatever and they have all this content, but then all of these other skill components that kind of wrap around it. You know, this critical skills, you know, like resilience, and collaboration, and problem-solving, they may not have those kinds of pieces because the system hasn’t been designed to kind of give them those skills.”

And so, that’s kind of why we started making the shift of, okay, well, if we’re going to deeply invest in helping and, I would say, supporting really, so all of our students who want to go to college, be able to graduate from college, we have to go ahead and give them the skills to do so. And it’s not just the academics skills, right? But also all these other skills that wrap around it. Because when we look across the country today, the reality is that less than 60% of students actually graduate college in six years. And if you’re a first generation or a low-income student, you have a 9% chance of graduating college in six years.

But at the same time, we know that diverse teams or better teams in every sense of, you know, the word. And so, we have to do a better job of making sure that all students can kind of access that path, which is why we’ve gone ahead and made this re-orientation.

Doris: Absolutely. And I won’t even call it soft skills because that diminishes what we’re talking about here. It’s so interesting that we do that in the education system. We, privilege that you learn how to differentiate an equation and then we say, “Oh, and isn’t it nice? Let’s create a program over there.” Maybe it’s a sport that you’re in or maybe it’s a STEM class or robotics, or some other thing over there where you learn things like, how to work with other people well. And how to communicate effectively, and how to problem solve when there’s no answer in the back of the book.

And we call those soft skills, when in fact, anyone who’s been out of school for five minutes knows what we now have research to support, which is what makes you successful in work and in life is more based on your ability to do these things, others will call soft skills and I won’t, to be able to work well with others and be adaptable and flexible and resilient and handle failure well, and pick yourself back up and all of those things are the things that will mostly determine your success in work and in life. And even your happiness in living in a social world at much more so than your ability to take a part of sentence with grammatical…Like, it’s crazy, what we do.

Jeremy: Right. I mean, these are the…I think of them like critical skills, because I don’t think…They’re definitely not soft skills. They’re harder to learn, in all sorts of the words. I also don’t really like necessarily like the term 21st century skills because they’re skills for every century, if you will, right? So I really think about them, as I would say, the critical skills because, I think, they’re critically important.

Doris: Yes, I completely agree. And it’s time for us to throw out the 19th century model and acknowledge that these are actually core academic skills. And put the responsibility of schools for giving students learning experiences over the course of their childhood where they’re not only going to learn how to learn really hard stuff like statistics and mathematics and grammar, but they also, at the same time, must have the opportunity to develop these skills in school so that they’re really ready and prepared to be successful in the world they’re going out into.

We have to call this academic, and we have to change what we call rigorous academics to include developing skills like this.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Doris: Okay, and I want to hear how it started and what happened. I remember you were coming to me around four years ago, you were an AP science teacher, and your school head decided let’s try an entrepreneurship class, and you were going to do some, sort of, an entrepreneurship class as an academic class for your seniors, came to the workshop. What happened?

Jeremy: So, right after that workshop. I think, that was actually a big shift for us, in terms of, okay, we saw that this works, you know, after school, now, I think, the next logical step is…You know, then we believed, I would say, in inclusivity and access, and when things happen after school or have to happen after school, and on the weekend, that isn’t inclusive, and that is not accessible to all students. And so that isn’t right.

And so, very much if we believe that this is an opportunity that all kids should have, which I do believe that it is, then let’s take it into the school day. So we started very small, which is the senior intensive course that had, I think, 11 students actually, two trimesters long, you know, built around the same ideas of solving real problems for real stakeholders. And for us, you know, the program that I built has been always been framed kind of around two big of overarching questions.

The first is, “Who I’m I?” and then the second is, you know, “How will I create impact in the world?”

Doris: Yes, and I’m going to actually interrupt you here because, this is really important as people understand. This isn’t about business and money making. Entrepreneurship, for me, is about training ideas into successful, repeatable realities. And, you know, when you think about that broadly, it applies to a lot of things, which is kind of what you’re saying.

Jeremy: Right. Because as we think about entrepreneurship, we’re not…You know, the way that we say it is…This isn’t about the next software startup. We’re not training students, you know, to be the next, you know, startup CEOs. There will be a small fraction that do that, may be 1%. Because we get asked a lot, you know, “So the kids learning finance? Are they learning marketing? Are they learning…What are they learning?”

And I, you know, I try to tell people that they’re learning, what I would say, right, is the idea of validation kind of portion of a lot of this. And they will learn some of those finance and marketing skills, but they will learn it in the context of the problem that they’re trying to solve. We want to give kids the skills, so that they can go learn all of those kind of pieces on their own as they need to on demand, right? Because that is what the world very much demands.

I mean, how have I learned how to do all these things? I did not go to college for this at all, right? I went a head, and I talked to people, I watch a lot of videos, I read a lot of books, you know, those kind of things and that’s what we’re asking, I think, of everyone as we’re going to move forward throughout your career and life.

Doris: Yeah. What an absurd idea. Think about it. So, I’m going to decide ahead of time, with all the information that is out there, I’m going to decide a head of time that this little sliver as content, maybe this little sliver of finance or this little sliver of history is the thing. I am going to make sure I teach this room full kids, and that’s what’s going to prepare them best for whatever comes their way. When you think about it like that, it really puts what we’re talking about in stark context.

Jeremy: Yeah, I mean that does make sense, right? So, it’s very much about giving the kids the skills and adults, too, right? The skills to recognize when, “Hey, I don’t know something and then what do I do from there to go figure it out? How can I learn on my own and how do I have…” First, I would say, again, the humility to say, “I don’t know how to do this. And that I am willing to kind of seek help,” right? Because that’s a really hard thing to do. And that here is a network that I built around me. Or here’s books, here are all sorts of resources. You know, we live in an age where you can access all sorts of information. You know, so then how do you actually then take and use that?

Doris: Absolutely. To your point about how you’ve learned, what you need to do the great work that you do? We’re teaching… as an example, in graduate schools, if you look at what we’re teaching in graduate schools of education, every bit of it is the wrong stuff. We’re actually not teaching people, the people who are going to become our teachers, the skills they need to get the learning to happen, to create learning experiences for others.

We’re also, in graduate schools of education, with teachers of the future, it’s all this content, and it’s completely beside the main point, which is, how does learning happen in all these different people, and then how do you craft an experience and guide all these different people through it to make the kind of learning happen. both in terms of learning, how to learn hard stuff and developing the skills, and then how do we see if it’s actually happening?

You know, it’s funny because I taught for 22 years, and what I’ve noticed is as, I’ve now been teaching other teachers, is that is that once you do the best work, like you, the thing they’re worried most about is they’re worried about, what each an every individual care in their class needs most next. And that’s why you couldn’t prepare for that before you knew who you had in the room. That’s why you’re constantly learning yourself.

Jeremy: Right, I agree. And I think if you’re going to empower kids you also have to empower the teachers, right? And give teachers the skills that they need to do learning in a different way. So, I think, that’s what’s challenging about going down a path like this is you may want to do work differently with students, but then the questions is how? Like, how do I actually do that? And what are the fundamental skills that I need as an educator to be able to best serve the students that I’m working with?

Because, you know, in your classrooms and my classrooms, it looks really different sometimes, where I think, a lot of it much more about facilitating, right? What you’re there to do is to kind of facilitate and to, kind of direct, if you will, but you’re also there to learn, even as an adult. And to understand to have the humility to kind of step into that space and say, “Hey, you know what? We’re in this together, and I am going to learn from you, and you’re going to learn some things from me.” And, I think, that takes a lot of humility from an adult, too.

Doris: Certainly. And the way I talk about this, when it comes to the students is students today, young people, they want to work on…they want work that’s relevant and meaningful. I think everybody always wanted that. But in this day and age, they really understand when they’re sitting in a classroom, and they’re being lectured a sliver of content that it isn’t relevant. And your leaderships has the foresight to have pioneered, been pioneers really, in changing the way we do school and knowing that we’re going to have to experiment and we’re going to have to do that by letting our teachers experiment, because we have to come up with entirely different methods and these are not different methods for extra curriculars or the extra stuff in the fab lab.

These are different methods for how we teach, so that the learning happens in any classrooms with any students. And re-defining really what we look at when we think about serving our students in school. And what we look at when we think about what academics means to us. And I really applaud you, I applaud your school, I applaud your leadership because this is what’s required if we’re going to do school better. And the reality is we’re not talking about doing school better inside a private school or certain charter schools that have the resources and the will. We’re talking of doing the school better for all kids.

Jeremy: I 100% I agree. I think that you’re right, it’s very much about shifting, you know, what is, I think, the role of school. Because let’s be honest, right? School and learning are two different things, and education and learning are different things. And we need to, I think, very much inspire young people to become life long winners, right? So that they’re continuing with learning throughout their life and continually diving in.

You know, because your why can fundamentally very much change throughout your life, but if you have the skills, where you can, you know, think critically, think deeply understand who you are, understand other people on the context within which you fit, and understand kind of where you want to go, then you can go ahead and constantly, I would say, re-invent yourself, which is, I think, what kids today are going to be asked to do multiple times kind of throughout their lives.

Doris: And so, you started with a pilot and then you did it a second time. I remember coming to the final presentations of your second entrepreneurship class. But what’s really interesting is what has happened since and how really school-wide change has happened in a great way at DSST. So, tell us a little bit about that.

Jeremy: Right. So, I mean, we have seen, I would say, the momentum just continue to grow. I would say the next, you know, big points along that journey is when we decided to take it now just from 12th grade but into the 9th grade and how are we actually taking this to a broad number of students. So, it’s not just, you know, 12 kids, but we’re talking now a whole grade level of students. And the intentional work that happens within our schools actually, were the staff team came together to say, “You know, do we want to actually change the schedule of our school to allow for an elective course like this..”

And ultimately those were some of the decisions that we made, and so we designed the entire schedule to go ahead and allow for and accommodate that. And then also working with the middle school team as well to bring it down into the 8th grade and 7th grade on the same campus, and the we’ve also scaled it to a 9th grade class at one of our other about other campuses. There’s a lot about the program that we do on top of it because we’ve had, I would say, really gone ahead and built up this very robust full kind of vertical model.

So today this far we have, you know, approximately 600 kids in our courses in our programs that’s now scaled within our network of 13 schools and as we look into the future we’re poised to continue to scale, and, I think, our current target is to scale to five additional high schools within our network. You know, serving approximately 1,400 kids within the next four years. And we currently have, you know, three additional people on the team and we’ll scale that to probably 10 in total, including myself, as we grow. And we continue to go ahead and build very robust partnerships, you know, both locally, nationally, and internationally, to allow our kids to, I would say, increasingly access this network of global changemakers, if you will.

So, I think, that’s one of the big things that is core for us, too, is we’re very interested in the global sustainability goals. And how do we actually bring people together to tackle real problems that are very big in scope and that matter? And I firmly believe that to do that, we actually have to connect people from across to globe to solve these problems. It’s not like some people from one area of the world will solve all these problems other people. It’s very much about this interconnectedness and authentically working together to collaborate, to build solutions to these very real, kind of, like, daunting problems.

And I believe that we have to actually start empowering young people to do that work now, today. And it’s not about, you know, reaching some point in your life where you’ve had a terminal degree that you can now contribute. But how do we give you skills to do that now? And how do we increasingly scale that across our network? But the reality is, that isn’t where we started that’s where we’ve come. And we’ve come that way in a pretty, I would say, a short period of time. But if you go back to the beginning, you know, it started with this after-school program, that then it went into the school day, very small but has grown increasingly large in a very short period of time. But, I think, it always comes back to this idea of dream big, start small, but most importantly start. And one of the little things that you can do along the way to go ahead and get there.

Doris: Exactly. And DSST is a very special school. Really what we’re talking about here is the story of what happens when the leadership of a school decides that we need to change the way we do school. And a leader like yours, like Bill, creates the conditions that allow a teacher like you to take risks and to himself experiment and to experiment with the school, and try things, different things, multiple times over that you don’t have any experience with, but that you have the confidence, can lead to something that makes school much more impactful and effective for the students.

And so, that’s what’s interesting about the story and while DSST and your school and you are such an exciting story. What’s really important about this story is that this is happening elsewhere, and it can happen everywhere. And what’s important is just start with a leadership that has the will to create the conditions for it to happen.

Jeremy: Yeah. So, I think, that’s true, and, I think, I’ve been fortunate to have the support of our network and board and everyone to go ahead and go on this journey, which I’m very thankful for. You know, that’s been a hallmark of our network, which is why I’ve continued to remain here, if you will, all these years. Because, I think, there’s a couple of things. One, you know, DSST is very much leading nationally, I would say, on this conversation around inclusivity and equity and pieces like that. And then, I think, there is also very much this humility of saying, and knowing that we don’t have everything figured out and every day we have to get better for our kids. And, I think, that becomes a part of everything that we do as a network, which has very much led to us taking this step of how to do we provide students with this critical skills that they’re going to need later in life on top of this academic foundation.

Doris: Yes, so, we are at an interesting time in education right now. Industry-wide educators understand..they really accept actually, they not just understand, they accept that what we’re doing, how we’re doing it is not helpful. They get it. But what they don’t have that they need is the “how?”

So, if I’m teaching five classes a day, whatever, inside a school, I need very well understand that my giving the worksheets and my giving the tests for a specific stuff and getting…I get that this is not the most hopeful thing for every single individual kid the room, but I don’t know how to do it differently. And as an industry, we need to create a completely different set of methods for the practice. And that’s really what I’m, you know, as you know very well, that’s what I’m working on. This is giving teachers inside classrooms the methods they need to create a completely different practice.

And every teacher like you, like others, every teacher, once they’re given what they need to try this out, this completely different, radically different way of constructing the learning experience and then actually executing it, which is what we call it instructional practice. Once they try that and they’re given what they need to try it, they’re designers, they’re artists, they’re architects, they will make it on their own, but we have to give people, give teachers the tools to completely and totally change the way they do school.

Jeremy: Yeah. I agree, and I think, you know, that’s where, you know, thankful to have randomly stumbled across you on the internet, if you will, you know, years ago fortuitously where I came across the workshop that you all were running because, I think, that has dramatically shaped and changed the path and You know, and, I think, a lot of people were probably very grateful to you. I know, I certainly am in the sense that, you know, I think, you’ve been a catalyst. And quite frankly, I think that’s what the best educators do is share, and what the best educators do is, you know, take and learn from others. There’s need for us to…As we’re trying to do all of this innovative work to, kind of, do it in silos and to do it packets, but we really should be taking and combining the best of what people are doing across this country because this is hard work. It’s really hard work and to be able to do without the people makes that certainly a ton easier.

Doris: Yeah. Every other industry has figured this out except education. We’re better together than alone. And that comes also into play when you’re trying to change what you do in a classroom, or you’re trying to change an entire school system. Jeremy, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.

Jeremy: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me, Doris. I really enjoyed our conversation, too.

Doris: Hello, Kesha.  

Kesha: Hello, Doris. How are you doing? 

Doris: I am doing great. And you and I have now really gotten to know each other. We’ve worked together for about two years now.

Doris: It has been awesome. And so, you know, you came to the first pilot, Burton D. Morgan, which is a phenomenal foundation in Cleveland that really supports, and promotes and grows entrepreneurship education in Northeast Ohio, funded scholarships to our workshops for public school educators, and educators who are working with public school students. And you and Laura were from LEADERship Ashtabula County, applied for those scholarships, and you both came to the first workshop. And what I would love for you to do is tell a little bit about yourself and then tell the listeners, you know, what brought you to the workshop, and what has happened since, and why it has happened since. 

Kesha: Yeah. It’s so exciting. So, a little bit about me, I practice law for a long time. I never really thought it was my thing. So, I found myself working at LEADERship Ashtabula County, running leadership programs, and I wanted to do things better than I had done before. I found your workshop, I came, my mind was blown away. I did my first pilot and I work with kids from Ashtabula County. There are seven public school districts and two private schools in the county, and I work with kids from all of those schools. And I did a leadership lab which was like entrepreneurship-based, and that was my first pilot. And then after that, one of the local school districts opened their doors to your methodology and to my enthusiasm, I guess, about it, and I did my second pilot within the four walls, so to speak, of that school, and that was last spring. And again, it was business-based. And then the first three weeks of this school year, I co-taught with a teacher in that same school district, Ashtabula Area City Schools. The high school is Lakeside. 

Doris: Yeah. And in between, you came to the workshop a second time with this teacher. 

Kesha: Yes. 

Doris: But talk for a minute about what this did for the students that you were teaching and at the end of the day, this is why we do this. Given where you are and where you’re doing this, why does this matter for these students in this county, Ashtabula County? And this is in Ohio. And describe it a little bit because people from all over the world listen to this, and I think setting the stage a little is really important. 

Kesha: Yeah. Ashtabula County is the largest in terms of land mass. It’s the largest county of 88 in Ohio, but it is one of the most rural, and it’s one of the most poor and one of the most unemployed. So, that’s kind of like a snapshot of the county. The schools, I think the largest high school graduates around 200 kids each year and about 60% of them don’t know what they’re going to do after they graduate, meaning like, they don’t have college plans. So this matters for students for so many different reasons, but it really matters particularly for the students in Ashtabula County where it’s economically disadvantaged right now in time and which kinda trickles into the schools. These students out here, they almost have like an inferiority complex because their schools have very little resources and they just don’t really think that anything, anything that’s going on, in and around them matters or is significant or is even worth fighting for. So, these kids, when they come out of their pilot have this new confidence that swagger to themselves and to what they are doing. That’s why it really matters.

Doris: Yeah. And some of these kids were really good. They never ever been in any kind of situation like this. And that accomplishment, I mean, that’s pretty…that’s gotta have had something to do with some of that swagger. 

Kesha: Yeah. 

Doris: What I would really love to hear you talk about is your pilot that you did this year inside a high school government class with this teacher, Lisa, and she’s been teaching this government class for many years in this public school. And you worked with her as she piloted this in a project in her class. And I would love for you to talk about that class, the students, what they did, and the results that you saw. 

Kesha: We set it up a little…very similar to how I’ve heard at least two other people in your podcast do their first pilot. In that, we did like a museum walk and the students chose, and there were, like, different local issues. Lisa was really passionate and her priority was she really wanted the kids to make connections between government and their daily lives. So, through that museum walk, the students chose an issue that mattered most to them. So, in the end…and there were like 30, 33 students, and homelessness was one of the topics that they presented on, mental health, the drug epidemic in the county, and the welfare system. Well, I’d love to share some excerpts from my co-teacher, Lisa Raffa. She has been a teacher in psychology and government in the last 20 years at Lakeside High School in Ashtabula. 

Lisa: I really feel the challenge of this project is to get kids more engaged in their community and more involved in their community, and have a different feeling about their community with the twist and the learning twist of it being from a government standpoint. Now, we’re going to take the community of Ashtabula and we’re going to learn about it, and we’re going to learn about the government. And then it will extend on to the government of Ohio, and hopefully, what’s happened to some expressions of the national government. So, at all levels and we’ve incorporated all branches. And this is a different self-inquiry, you know. It’s in themselves and they are the investigators. And this is a different kind of questioning because you’re not questioning about content, you’re questioning about, you know, higher level thinking and higher level problems. And you’re trying to get a kid to do some self-inquiry because I’m used to I give them information, I spit it out, they absorb it, and I find out how well they absorbed it in the exact information I gave out. This is something that is a method that we’re just not used to, but the most important thing I feel like they got was that they can do it and they could do anything, and they’re feeling confident about themselves. 

Doris: Yeah. So it’s an 11th grade, right? 

Kesha: Yes. 

Doris: It’s an 11th grade government class and her learning objectives were her wanting them to engage with and learn about local government. So, the idea was that they choose local problems they want to solve and then, you know, the way the solutions are, you know, in order to come up with a valid evidence-based, well-researched solution, you have to get into how the government impacts, the local government impacts the problem or the solution or…well, you can talk about this better than I can. I saw the presentations and I was really impressed. But I’d love for you to talk a little bit about that and also who these students are. 

Kesha: Sure. So, the students…This was a class where you could tell the minute I walked in the room the first day, government was not a class that they cared about or school in general. The first week of class, there were so many absences. I was a little scared about how this would go. But by the end of it, no one was missing and everyone was staying after class to get their work done which was pretty awesome to see. What happened was after they started digging around in their respective issue, they found something that they cared about. For example, you know, the team that was working in and around homelessness, one of the girls shared with her team that her dad was homeless while she was growing up and he lived in a certain park, and they’re still a homeless population there. And it’s really close to school and, you know, there’s a stigma around being homeless. And once she opened up to her teammates, they just took off. In that same team, there was a student who was very defiant and he tried so hard to not care about anything. He was always taking bathroom breaks. He was always on his phone. He was, you know, just always, always being really combative with his teammates. And after she shared that, a few days later, he came into class. And I was checking in on that team just, you know, seeing how things are going and whatever, and he was the one that looked at me and he said, “Ms. Conway, we have a lot of work to do. Can you please go talk to another team?” 

Doris: Wow, wow. That’s really something. I’ll tell you, I came…You and I talked along the way during this and I came to the presentations. And I was really blown away by the variety of problems they chose, and the really creative solutions, some of them came up. Some of those teams, in particular, had really innovative ideas and they all involved, in some form, local government. 

Kesha: Yeah. Let’s hear from a student about her experience. 

McKenna: My name is McKenna Grady and I’m a junior at Lakeside High School, and our topic was welfare. And while we were researching it, like, it was showing how the different branches and stuff relate to the welfare and how the money gets disbursed and everything. So like, I have a better understanding of it, rather than just, like, reading it out of the book. And I learned that welfare doesn’t necessarily just fall under one category. Like, usually when people think of welfare, they think of one program, but there’s actually, like, a lot of things that go into it. There’s food stamps and then, like, the TANF program which is, like, cash assistance. And, like, there’s just a whole bunch of stuff in Ohio. And after looking into different countries and stuff, it’s hard seeing how, like, their welfare systems are way different than ours. So kind of just based our solution off of that. And then with our local solution, it was kind of just like how we could get people to save money and worrying more about getting off of welfare, and getting out of poverty. 

Kesha: So, this student, I mean, she really hit it home to me after the presentations and she kind of put those…my level of anxiety about, you know, them being able to understand and apply what they learned in this pilot to the particular test, the state test that they have to take. I mean, I remember the first day when Lisa and I were…I’m kinda queuing up there the whole pilot and she sat there with her hands, you know, across her chest, and her head kinda cock to one side just kind of fuming. You could just see, like, the blood, just her blood was boiling. She was mad. She was really mad and she thought that this whole thing was going to be a waste of time. She probably reacted like that for the first, I would say, like, the first few days, you know. And then she was making all the transitions that one can only hope for. By the end of the pilot, she told me…now, going through those three weeks, she said that she felt more prepared for that test because of all of her research and all of the things that she learned about the welfare system, and how it connects on the federal level, on the state level, and at the local level. And yeah, she felt more prepared for that test because of what we had just done in those last three weeks. 

Doris: Yeah. Well, that’s pretty big and I’d like to hear what you think, and maybe have some specific stories or maybe you can tell in general. I felt watching those kids present and listening to what they are presenting, I felt hopefulness from them. Did you experience that in them during the course of the pilot? 

Kesha: Yes, without a doubt. The first day I got in there, it was your typical…you know, everyone just got into their seats. They just kind of…they barely looked up. They just wanted to know what they had to do, they would do it, and then they wait for the bell to ring, and go. By the end and right before the presentations, that classroom was just alive, and they were working together and sharing ideas. And there were so many different kids in that class, like, so many of them didn’t know each other’s names, you know, etc, etc. And by the end of it, they found out that they had so much in common that they just assumed that they didn’t. And they had, like I said before, coming out of those presentations, they had the swagger that I don’t think that each and every one of them, like, knew they had. 

Doris: Well, because they…I mean, I have my idea, but why do you think? Why do you think they had that? 

Kesha: Because that was theirs. They did that. All of the work, all of the…I don’t know, anticipation, all of the unknowns they discovered, that was theirs. And that was the first time that they were allowed to have authority over something in their lives that really mattered.

Doris: Let alone inside school, inside an academic course.

Kesha: Heck yeah.

Doris: I also have to say and we can call this whatever we want. I’m not going to use any edu-jargon. I witness a moment in those presentations and there were a lot of them, a lot of kids, a lot of presentations, that I’ve never seen quite like that before, and it was really tender, and it will stay with me forever. But there was a student who clearly didn’t speak English not only as a first language, but barely spoke English. And his team was presenting, and they had given him one part of the presentation which was to read, just read a slide. And he was extremely nervous. His English was very…he had very little command of English. He was struggling mightily and another member of his team, a boy, walked over. So, there are four or five people on this team presenting and these boys were not standing next to each other. In fact, they weren’t standing on the same…they were standing on different sides of the screen, the large screen where the presentation was showing. And one student saw that he was struggling, and very, very gently moved over next to this boy to stand unobtrusively, quietly. He didn’t want to take the attention at all away from the boy who was presenting to basically stand very, very close to him so that he could, I assume, though I couldn’t hear it, whisper. And then it was hard to even tell because the boy was trying to do it without you being able to see. But I assume he was whispering to the boy who was reading or trying to read what the item was so that the boy could then say it. Is that what was happening?

Kesha: That was exactly what was happening and that’s what I was trying to say. But you said it way better about how there were a lot of students in this class that had never interacted with each other before and now they’re friends.

Doris: It’s really something. And we are now in this happy position because of all the good work that you’ve done in Ashtabula where we now have multiple educators from a couple of other schools, a middle school and a high school who are coming to workshop to design their pilots, and go back and pilot in their schools. So, it’s spreading in Ashtabula County.

Kesha: Yeah. So, there are nine high schools out here and after my first pilot…well, at the presentations, at my first pilot, there were several administrators from several different school districts in the room. Immediately after the presentations and, you know, after they were kind of grilling the students in all the right ways, they approached me and several of them said, “We need this for our students.” And that was just seeing the presentations. So, I was totally pumped. And fast forward to now, there are two school districts now that are working with you to spread this throughout their districts.

Doris: The reality is that the timing is really, really good for trying out a completely different way of teaching. There’s something that’s happened literally in the past few months. I think I spoke earlier of this as feeling like we’ve kinda past the tipping point where, literally, everybody who’s in education paying any attention at all. And I don’t mean just attention to the conversation, I mean attention to their students. Totally, without a doubt, with the world so vastly changed by technology and the classroom not, this stark contrast between how we do school in K12 and the rest of the world outside of school is undeniable. It doesn’t work and, you know, everybody in education in K12 has chosen kids as their life’s work. They’re not doing it for the money.

Kesha: Yeah. This stuff is so important to students out here, so to speak, and students in general that…I mean it’s, like, my imperative right now. It’s the thing that just drives me. So, watch out, world. Here we come. 

Doris: Great talking to you, Kesha, as always.

Kesha: You too, Doris. Thanks so much.

Doris: Hello Nick.

Nick: Hi Doris, how are you?

Doris: I am wonderful. I’m so excited to talk to you.

Nick: Yeah, I’m really excited to talk to you too.

Doris: Yeah. And Nick, you came to the workshop three summers ago.

Nick: That’s right.

Doris: And I would love for you to start by telling our listeners about yourself, who you are, what you do, where you’re doing it, and why you came to the workshop, and you know, start with that.

Nick: All right. Well, I am a second career teacher. I came to teaching after 12 years in the advertising industry. I originally trained as a graphic designer and worked in a variety of different areas of the industry. And my mid-30s, I just decided I need a change and I had always wanted to be in education. And you know, it took some shifts in my mid-30s that really sort of lit a fire under me to start that change. I went back to school for teaching, and just by chance, I was hired on a short-term contract at a school, an PK-12 independent school in Hamilton, Ontario called Hillfield Strathallan College. And when I started, one of my colleagues said to me, you know, “If you want this to be full time, just make it full time.” And I spent that first year just seeing everything that was available at the school and realizing that it was the kind of place that if you wanted to try something, you could and they’d support you in that.

So in my first year, I took a group of students to Tanzania and we climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and we worked at a school, and I teach Communications Technology so we’re looking at things with technology, graphic design, and web design. So it just seemed like a really good fit for me to be here, and soon after that I was hired full time, and a few years ago, one of the courses that I was asked to teach was Small Business Management. Now, I had worked independently on contract work as a designer, so I kind of, “Maybe I can do this.” And the first year, I jumped in and I was following sort of the curriculum that was set by the previous teacher, and that it was a great curriculum but it wasn’t totally clicking with my approach and it was at that time that my colleague and the Director of Academics, Brenda Zwolak sort of tapped me on the shoulder and showed me your workshop and said, “Let’s go.”

So we registered, bought our plane tickets and we went south of the border to attend.

Doris: Yeah, that’s absolutely wonderful. And you came out of the workshop, and what’d you do with what you got there?

Nick: So, full disclosure, I was exhausted, because in the Canadian system we’re about three weeks behind you so we were still in the middle of exams, and I flew down and I remember thinking, “Do I have the energy for this right now?” And you know, went through the workshop, sat with you, sat with Alison, looked at what I could do and how I could rebuild, not really rebuild because it was a great program, but how I could adapt to it and change it. And you know, I had my booklet from you and I had all of my notes, and the one thing that really sort of stayed with me, one of your parting comments was, “Just pick one viable thing, one thing that you know that you can do.”

And so that’s what I did. I sort of looked at what we had done in the course. I used a lot of your resources and I revamped the course for the next year. So going into the next year, I had two different classes with two very different groups of students, and realized that I kinda had to teach two different courses that year just to appeal to all of their senses.

Doris: Yeah, because it’s about them and not about us, right?

Nick: Right, yeah, for sure.

Doris: You know, I know it’s been a while, even that has been a while, but how did it go, how was it for the students, how was it for you. What happened?

Nick: So the first year, it was sort of the first year in teaching any course. I changed it every day. So I was looking at different competitions that were going on within the community. I was going down to our university, to their innovation hub and listening to university students talk about businesses they’ve started or how they’ve launched ideas. I took some of my students down to see them talk, or sent them down to see them talk. So there was a lot of that but there was a lot of just sort of eye-opening experiences. One of them that, you know, struck me, I was in Buffalo, which is just about an hour south of here, and there was a skin cream that I saw in the store and on the back, it said, “Created by Zandra; a teenage girl and CEO.”

So we looked up this product and here is this, you know, 14, 15-year old girl from Buffalo who’s created this amazing skin care product line but all of the proceeds are going towards keeping girls in school and encouraging them into post-secondary education. So a lot of the course at the beginning of the year just became highlighting these points and sort of case studies. Why was this product successful? What was the market? What was the problem that they were trying to solve?

So using approaches like the BMC, the Business Model Canvas, students were coming back and pitching these ideas as if they were the entrepreneurs.

Doris: Oh, that’s fantastic. So then what? What did you…you know, talk about what this kind of education has been like for your students, what’s come out of this for them, the first year since then, what are you finding?

Nick: I’m really finding they’re really digging deep into their sort of creative mindset. So you know, much like we talked about in the workshop, I would have local entrepreneurs come in and pitch their problem. So one was a man who has a solar energy business and he wanted to reach a bigger market to encourage people to buy in to solar power. Another was a local artist who, you know, in the final 10 years of his career really wanted to make an impact and get into social media and market this product, but he didn’t know how to do it.

So that was great to see the professional side come in, seeing students interviewing them, and then working in groups to deliver, to deliver ideas. And to see the really creative ideas that came out, ideas that I never would have thought of. And that’s the great part. Some of the ideas that they came up with, I don’t know how they came up with them.

Doris: Yeah, well, they did a lot of research also, probably.

Nick: Exactly. A lot of market research, digging deeper. I feel like I said “dig deeper” probably 60 times in a week, but you know, then as we worked through the year, it was on them to come up with their own project. So our school mascot is the Trojan, so we came up with this concept of the Trojan trials and it’s sort of like a shark tank approach where they come up with a concept for their business and they have to make it happen. They then pitch to a panel of judges from industry.

Doris: Sure.

Nick: And it’s a full day event, we record it, there are prizes and awards, prizes for, you know, best idea, best presentation, best pitch, most viable product. And what was great out of that, especially the last year was to see the number of students who actually turn their business into reality.

Doris: Oh, that’s interesting.

Nick: And we had other groups who didn’t implement the business, but really came up with some neat ideas.

Doris: Yeah that’s what happens, right? And Nick, I want to ask two questions, I found that while I found programs like that now increasingly all over the place where high school students, even middle school students are creating their own business ideas and pitching to shark tank type panels. I, in my experience, having had the students work on solving problems of other businesses on teams and learning foundational skills, how to do good research, how to creatively problem solve with some parameters and some… That having students do work in problem solving prior to that is for me an essential. That the quality of what they do when they create their own businesses, to solve their own problems, is entirely different if they have done all this stuff beforehand. Do you find that as well?

Nick: Absolutely. When I look back at some of the problems that came to us, they weren’t, you know, always glamorous problems that teenagers wanted to jump into. They were solar energy and a local ceramic artist, and some of the kids haven’t thought of…you know, keen on ceramic artists or potter and all in their like, so a lot of it was sort of getting past that. It’s not about the product, it’s about the problem and learning about the industry, learning about who that target market is. And so it’s all that work ahead of time to get into the mindset of that. Or when we were looking at solar energy, looking at how much can one household produce with solar panels and how much is the government going to subsidize them if they invest $40,000 to put these solar panels on the roof. And what’s the profit factor in that, and how do they figure all of that out?

And when they would ask me that, that is when I would say, “I don’t know how. That’s what you have to go and figure out.” So as a teacher, it was great. I could just say, “You go do it. I don’t know.”

Doris: I don’t know. And I think not having any answer in the back of the book forces them to focus on, I don’t think it, I believe it that…and I’ve seen it, it forces them to focus on the process. Instead of where can I find the answer to the question and give it back to the teacher, they have to…it’s an entirely different type of learning because they’re learning by doing and they’re doing it on a team, so they have to really very intentionally and thoughtfully craft process. And that for me, is the strategic part of all this. And having done it with problems you give them that are of someone else, you know, whether it’s solar panel company or ceramics or a new water filter design, they learn a lot of foundational skills by doing that, that I think they bring in to this shark tank kind of thing and it becomes an entirely different thing than what I see when I go around the country and I see the kind of, “Oh, let’s do a startup weekend with a shark tank,” which…and I’m not disparaging those. Those are fun things and they’re great but we’re talking about entrepreneurship education as an academic course, to me makes sense because it’s about skill building in decidedly academic things and it’s not really about the money or even business actually.

Nick: Yeah, I find it at schools too, a lot of it is not about the mark. At the beginning of the year was, “How am I going to be marked on this?” And I would just say, “Well, we’ll figure that out. We’ll get to that.” And I had to be reminded, “We need marks.” And I would, you know, we would do midpoint check-ins and presentations and those sorts of things, but the mark wasn’t the focus here. What was great was when that client came back and they pitched their idea, and the client jumped on board with something. And so I hadn’t thought of that and there’s no mark for that. That is a connection that was made and the sharing of ideas. So yeah, I could give you an A-plus or whatever might fit that, but it’s not about that.

And I think they see that now, so students that I taught last year who I’ve passed in the hallway and they say, “Oh, I just read this,” or, “I saw this idea and I thought it was what we learned in the class.” Or, “This is empathy” or this…you know, those are the great moments where I don’t even remember what a mark was and it doesn’t matter because, you know, people don’t really remember their mark a year down the road or when they’re coming back, remembering things we learned, that’s where I would think, “This is what we’re doing here, it’s great.”

Doris: Yeah, that’s what we’re doing and I think the interesting thing about what you just said is as teachers, it’s a very common thing for a teacher teaching any course to talk to students about, “Look, don’t worry so much about the grade or the mark. You worry about the learning and the growth.” The difference in this case is it’s not even so much what you say that you say it’s not about the mark. It’s that they get to a point in the class…and the reason, at the beginning, you just say, “Oh wait, we’ll figure it out later” is you know that when they get engaged, when they realize, “Wow, this is about my solving a real problem for someone out there.” Then that becomes where they get their motivation and their drive, and then their fulfillment for having done a good job afterwards.

Nick: Yeah. I completely agree.

Doris: Yeah, it’s really interesting. And then the other thing I was going to ask you about in terms of these businesses that the students themselves are creating is what do you find with the students who move on and actually continue with the business? Do you find entire teams doing that or just one student here, one student there? I just think that’s interesting because I have found in my own entrepreneurship courses that increasingly they develop businesses that are really viable and have legs but very few of them move on to create them because things like going to college and other things seem to draw them instead.

Nick: Yeah, I look back at the first year after taking the course to the second year and the ideas that came out of it. What I learned from the first year is what you just said. Come up with something that you can actually do. So the first year we had some amazing ideas that couldn’t necessarily be pulled off in the time that we had, or what we had to work with.

In the second year, we talked about those ideas and how we could actually make them happen. So when I think back to four specifically, one of them, a group of students did something that was very feasible to do within the school. They put together amazing presentations. They went to school fairs and pitched their idea to our parent community to get feedback. They were sort of like a Makerspace 3D modeling type of business.

Another one was just a simple app that would take them out of school and into universities, and it was helping kids to shop for themselves and cook for themselves. And then the group that actually got up and running, you know, easily turned it into a summer job. So while some of them didn’t bring them to life, it sparked sort of an entrepreneurial mindset within them where they’re now thinking, “Oh, when I go to school, I want to take this course but I’m looking at this school because they also have an entrepreneurial program,” or, “They have an innovation hub where I can work and bring ideas, I will, you know, bring them to life.”

So even for the students who maybe when they go into university, they’re not looking at that, they’re looking at ways to include that into their education.

Doris: So Nick, it’s one thing to talk about doing these as weekend workshops or summer camp programs, but why would some…a class like this fit, as in for academic credit class in school. What are your thoughts about that? Are the students learning things that you could qualify as academic in this class?

Nick: Absolutely, they are. I mean, I think I look back…well, I look at our strategic plan for our school and out of the pillars that have come forward, one of them is entrepreneurial spirit. And you know, looking at that, what is that term and we work to define that and everyone can have their own definition. But you know, part of it is the idea that kids are going to school for jobs that don’t exist yet, or the market has changed and it’s so important to be able to go out and come up with that job or come up with that idea. So just having those skills to me are just as important as any other skill that we’re learning in school.

For kids who came to the course because, “Oh, I needed to fill a spot in my time table.” They said, “Okay, well, if that’s your reason, that’s great. But I want you to leave this class with the ability to stand up in front of 200 people and pitch an awesome idea in 2 minutes or less, and do it with confidence, and strategically, and really wow them,” because that’s something that you could take into any job, into any industry anywhere in life.

Doris: Yeah, I was just going to say what you just described. Anybody who’s been out of school for five minutes knows that if somebody can do that, the skills required to be able to do that well and the confidence and the mindset and everything else are much more the qualities that determine someone’s success in life or productivity, then one’s ability to regurgitate facts even assuming you can remember them a year later after you’ve memorized, right? So Nick, you give a great answer, you’re the teacher of the class. How is this accepted as an academic course at your school and in your school community?

Nick: I think people are looking at it sort of from that same lens. They’re looking at it come forward in their class. it’s making that sort of crossover into another class where I can, “Here are the materials, if you want me to show you what to do, but the kids know how to do it, they’ll show you.”

So it’s seeing or having my colleagues see this as a really viable path and that they’re bringing skills into their other courses. So I think it’s something that just naturally contributes to all of the other classes in an academic setting.

Doris: Yeah, and I mean, in the three years since, you know, you came to the second workshop I ever did and what’s been really interesting since then is to see that of the hundreds of people that I’ve had the luck to work with, fewer than a third of them are teaching entrepreneurship classes. I mean, they’re teaching all the…what people consider core subjects and interdisciplinary courses and all kinds of things.

Nick: Right. Well, and what I teach…so I taught the Small Business Course for a number of years. This year, a new teacher is teaching it with the same setup, and it’s great to see what new eyes bring in to something, right? “What did I overlook? What didn’t I cover? What could I have done better?” And what’s exciting for me as a teacher is working in a school that embraces that idea to do something different or, you know, create a new challenge, and not long after the course, I think it was the January after the course, the Head of our college sent out a blanket email to all staff and students that said, “If you could do anything in this school, the sky’s the limit, money’s not an issue, what would it be?” And so a colleague and I who had both worked in the advertising and design industry before teaching, instantly said, “Oh, we would run a studio. We’d run a marketing studio within the school.” So you know, we pitched our proposal and then we found out about this fund, so there’s a great fund at our school called the David Tutty Joy and Innovation Fund, and it was named for a parent who had unfortunately passed away and a fund had been started in his name to encourage anyone to come up with something new.

So we pitched this idea and we were given the go ahead, and they funded the renovation of a studio space, and you know, within six months, we had hired six students and two accounting students to manage our books, and six student designers. And we run it in the classroom setting, we follow the curriculum, but we don’t know what it’s going to be until we get a client in. So you know, we advertise…

Doris: It’s awesome. So they work on solving a client’s problem?

Nick: Right. So they don’t work on anything that our classes are working on. So the client will come in, “I’m a doctor, and I need a new website for my practice.” Or, “I’m starting up a new practice and I need help. How do I develop a brand?” So the students run the meetings, they ask the questions, they work on things like, you know, as simple as professionalism, greeting them at the door, the handshake, that first point of contact, getting the information, working with the accounting students to quote on the job. The accounting students in the background have to figure out, you know, at the end of the job, was this profitable for us? What’s the profit factor? Did we quote properly? Did we need to revamp that? But the great thing on it or about it is the student designers will work on the design and as a teacher in the classroom setting, you can give your feedback and then the project’s over.

But here, the client comes in and says across the board, “I don’t like any of the designs. I need something new.” It builds up that resilience in the kids. So they have to start over whether they like it or not and they might present an idea that they love but it’s not a fit for the client and in this case, you know, the client wants what they want. So it’s teaching that resiliency, developing their creativity further, and also really listening to somebody’s needs, getting out of your own mindset and figuring out what they want.

Doris: That’s fantastic and that’s amazing. And the other thing that it is, is every client that comes in probably is offering up something new that they don’t know, the students aren’t familiar with, so they have to learn because of the need to learn. So they’re probably learning how to learn some really hard stuff.

Nick: And it goes the same for Kristy Faggion, who was my colleague who I run this with. It’s the same for us. So you know, we think, “Oh, we can figure this out. We’ll figure out how to do it.” And it’s not always a success. We’ve had some areas, you know, where we haven’t succeeded and we’ve learned from it.

Doris: That’s fantastic.

Nick: We’re in our second year now, so some of our designers have graduated and gone on to school, and some of them have gone on to school in a related field. And then we have new designers coming in, the senior designers mentor the juniors. The senior accountant mentors the junior accountant, and we just sort of get to oversee it as it unfolds, which is really exciting and it’s also just really amazing to see the kids pitch to people from, you know, outside of the school to do something different. And you know, after school hours, they’re happy because they get a paycheck.

Doris: That’s awesome. I love this. I love hearing all the things you’ve built here, but what I also…what this also says…so one thing that’s exciting about this is you as a teacher, as a designer, as a learner yourself, it’s really inspiring. But the other thing that’s really exciting to me is that you’re telling the story that is the…the sort of poster child for the need to have school leaders who are willing to let teachers experiment and innovate. And you know, the reason I wanted to find an independent school myself seven years ago is not because they’re better but I wanted to find one that would allow experimentation where I could use it as a lab. You’re using your school as a laboratory, Nick, and it’s really, really inspiring.

Nick: Yeah. And there are those moments where we sit here and think, “Oh my gosh, what have we done?” And one thing I should have mentioned today in my grade nine class, this is Communications Technology so we’re working on vector design. So students are drawing vector portraits either of themselves or their dog or a celebrity, and a grade nine student is doing an amazing job, and yesterday she came up to me and she said, “You know, I showed my mom and I was just hired to do six vector portraits at her office of the employees for their website. What should I charge for this?”

So we had this great talk about what is your work worth, and all these things. And then I thought, “We haven’t even finished the project yet, then already she’s got a job to design six of these…”

Doris: Isn’t that something?

Nick: “…of these portraits and she’s 14.”

Doris: And it isn’t about the money, it’s about the empowerment that comes and the confidence that comes from knowing that you’re able to do something that someone else thinks has value and that you’ve created while you’re still in school.

Nick: Doris, we had one student who has now graduated who was a senior designer last year, and he…you know, they get a paycheck in our design studio for any work that’s not done during the school day. So they can sign out the laptop if they have to meet that Monday deadline. They log those hours, they get a paycheck. And when he went to India to visit his family, he told me that, you know, he had told his grandmother when he gets his first paycheck, you know, when he was all grown up, he would give to her. And he got his paycheck from here and when he went to visit her in India, he gave her that first paycheck, and I thought, “What a neat experience that was in the first…” And I secretly went into my office and, you know, wiped a little tear from my eye thinking, “You’re so grown up already,” so.

Doris: Yeah, his first paycheck, he didn’t have to wait until he was 24.

Nick: Yeah. And it was something that he created for himself. And then, you know, one of the greatest things is seeing how wonderful the clients are with students. And also, hearing from clients afterwards saying…you know, the number of times we’ll hear them say, “I wish we had this when I was in school.” And I think that’s how education is changing, right? We have to adapt with these things and even if, you know, this is a design thing that we’re doing, but if the student’s going in to medical school from here, they’re still taking all of those components that they learned and adapting them to meeting people, talking to people, problem solving.

Doris: Well, yes, and what you’re describing is design writ large. It is design in the broadest sense, which encompasses problem solving. It encompasses empathy, all those things you talked about. And I agree with you, what’s happening in education is we’re seeing people like yourself creating entirely different models of what school can be and for the kind of learning to happen that people living today and tomorrow need, we have to involve members of the community outside the school walls. We have to. And they want to be. That is always the single thing educators on training are most worried about until they’ve tried it. And the minute you ask somebody, “Hey, I’m teaching a high school class,” whether it’s a history class or a design class or an entrepreneurship class, and, “Can you come in and be a judge for some presentations?” Or, “Can you be a mentor?” That it is never hard to get people to participate, do you agree with that?

Nick: I completely agree, and I worried about that too at your course thinking, “Who am I going to get?” Really picturing my neighborhood and picturing the businesses, and it all just came out through conversation; standing, you know, paying for an object. “Where did you find…” you know, a conversation comes up, “Where do you teach?” And sort of the aha light comes on. And then even at our school, and this is what I would recommend to other schools, our alumni manager has become my best friend through this process. So you know, I want a judge who is in…I need someone from the tech industry or somebody who knows something about app development and into the database, and then I have three people lined up. So it’s also a great way to reengage people into your schools who might have graduated, even students who are just finishing their first year of university.

Doris: Yeah. And I was just talking to a public school teacher here I work with, who was very worried about the same thing when she went through the training. And literally, what she did is she asked one of the student’s parents she knows who works for an insurance company, and that’s all she had to do, and that person within, I think she said two days, came back with somebody who said they’d love to help out. This was in middle school, a history teacher, love to help out, we’ll get somebody who knows…you know, who does work with immigrants in this community, and they’ll come be your judge. It’s like the easiest thing, even things specific like that.

Well, Nick, I’m blown away by the wonderful things you’ve done in these three years, and yet, I’m not surprised having seen you in the workshop. And I can only imagine what you will have built three years from now. You’re having a blast, huh?

Nick: Yeah. And if you are ever, you know, heading up this way, I’d love you to take you through DesignWerx, our studio, I don’t think I mentioned the name, but I’ll introduce you to some of the student designers and accountants who are sort of running the show here and letting you see them pitch and do their thing, so.

Doris: I’m going to absolutely take you up on it. We’re going to be in your neighborhood soon and I will take you up on it.

Nick: Terrific.

Doris: All right. Nick, thank you so much.

Nick: All right, thanks so much, Doris.

Doris: So, hello, Pam.

Pam: Hi.

Doris: So I’m so happy to be with you. And this is just after you finished your pilot, your first-ever. Can you please start by telling folks about yourself and then what brought you to the workshop.

Pam: Yes. So my name is Pam Reed. And I’ve been teaching in Columbus City Schools for 20 years. I love everything about urban education. I started teaching at a middle school on the south side of Columbus and was working with the mostly Appalachian and African-American population. I went to an elementary school for one year and found that elementary is not for me at all. And that time I got my master’s degree in teacher leadership. I have my national board certification in ELA, which I just renewed. And then I came here to Columbus City Preparatory School for Girls, where my daughters both also attend. I have two girls who are 15 and 11 who go here. I teach 8th grade English. And then this year we are starting a pilot program of teaching an 8th-grade humanities class, which I got to write and teach.

Doris: That’s so exciting. So you’re teaching humanities and you’re teaching English?

Pam: Yes.

Doris: And this is a… Can you tell a little bit about the school?

Pam: Yes. So our school started in 2010. The founder of the school still works in Columbus City and she visited different private girl schools around the country to find…to put together a model of what would work for us. We’re one of the few urban middle schools for girls in the country. We basically take girls as a lottery system from all over the city. And teach them like we have an advisory program here. We have morning salutes. We have a morning meeting every morning. Our girls get to have core enrichment. So they do…it’s not like a traditional thing where there is intervention. We have clubs and tons of opportunities for shadowing and hospitals and businesses. It’s a really different environment.

Doris: And it’s the only girl’s public school in the City of Columbus, correct?

Pam: It is. We’re one of the few in the state. I don’t think there’s another public girl’s middle school in the state of Ohio.

Doris: Really interesting.

Pam: Yeah.

Doris: So you came to the workshop. Talk about what that did for you and what you came out deciding to do and what just happened like tell us a little bit about that.

Pam: Well, as a teacher, I’ve always been a risk-taker. So if there was something that was new or innovative I was always willing to try it. And coming to the workshop, I had no idea to be honest with you what to expect.

Doris: Sure.

Pam: So my principal kind of posed this entrepreneurial lab idea. And when she posed it I actually wrote a grant to get kind of what I envisioned in my head. But the workshop was not what I had envisioned. I thought it would be one of the pre-packaged like here’s what you do kind of deal.

Doris: Here’s the packaged curriculum for an entrepreneurship class.

Pam: Yes. And here’s how we’re all going to practice it the same way. And we’re going to… And what it was kind of my dream educational experience, where I got to be the educator that I’ve always wanted to be. It was… I said to then, that it was…it’s like getting permission to teach the way that I always wanted to teach.

Doris: That’s awesome.

Pam: Which was through critical thinking and research analysis and questioning things and but it wasn’t content, you know, curriculum-driven…

Doris: Driven.

Pam: …it was allowing the students to find their own way through history or through ELA.

Doris: Yeah. So you came in thinking you were going to get this curriculum to do an entrepreneurship class. And then you ended up designing, in the workshop, a pilot for your humanities course.

Pam: I did. When we did the business model, I could see that becoming a problem-solution…

Doris: Framework.

Pam: A framework for looking how my students could look at situations in history or current events.

Doris: Yeah. And because when you got there and you started seeing what this was and decided, “Oh wow, this is…I want to use this in my humanities course.” You started thinking very differently about the start to your humanities course this year. And can you describe a little how you set up what these students of yours just went through and this is the first month of school in 8th grade in your humanities course and how many girls in your class?

Pam: I have 31 girls.

Doris: 31 girls. So tell us a little bit about your pilot.

Pam: So I dissected all of my curriculum. I made all these maps. I did all these things. And I still couldn’t wrap my head around how do I get them to care about history? And I didn’t want them just to do history or turn something in, in history. I want them to make connections between what’s happened in the past and what’s happening today. So my student-teacher and I, Ms. Ellis, we found 40 of the most important events kind of what we thought were the most important events of the 21st century. So everything from the minimum wage gap to the Pulse Nightclub shooting to the transgender military ban. And we found pictures. We just started out with pictures.

And we set up the library with pictures all around the room and just a placard that described what the event was just “Pulse Nightclub shooting” that was it. So the girls would have to go around and they examined everything. They took notes on what they saw. And they can use their phones to do research. And then they had to pick one event. And the next day we did a problem pitch. I was so not sure how this would work.

Pam: I was like this was going be a disaster.

Doris: Yeah, scary, yeah.

Pam: They’re going to not do it first of all.  I will have girls bow out because they don’t want to speak. And what happened was every single person had a pitch prepared for the next day. A 60-second pitch, to explain why this event is the most important event in the 21st century. And they did their own research overnight like this is the first week of school they’re doing this big huge thing and…

Doris: What are some of the examples of whatt the girls came in and pitched the next day?

Pam: I mean, well, like the Charlottesville attack, the clash at Charlottesville, they did a ton of research. It was the research that impressed me the most because if I would have said, “You have to research this,” and given them this whole list of questions that they had to answer. I gave them no direction. So what they came in with were stories of people who were involved in Charlottesville or how the minimum wage actually affects a single mother or things that I just I didn’t think about, the girls listening…so the audience, were active listeners. They had to rank the pitches. So they ranked. They had to pick the top eight because we have a big class. And the top eight pitches became our actual research project topics. And man, they were a very diverse group of topics.

Doris: Yeah. And they’re contemporary issues these girls wanted to solve or address somehow.

Pam: Yes. And everybody got their first or second choice are the groups that they wanted to work on. And so Black Lives Matter, racial profiling, Trump presidency. So they were researching…they had to figure out the, what the true problem is. We had to go through this process of how do we refine a problem?

Doris: That’s huge.

Pam: It was huge.

Doris: Yeah.

Pam: It challenged me so much as a teacher. It’s not just… It’s very different for me just to give curriculum. I know how to do that.

Doris: Yes.

Pam: But for me to get you to think about how to get a question out to a solvable problem and you’re 14 years old. Because they would say like, “How can we possibly solve this problem?”

Doris: Right.

Pam: You can. There’s a way for you to do it. And when they would…so we worked through a six-question kind of distilling process and they would get their question down to something that they felt was solvable. And they went in directions that I didn’t even think they would go in at all. So women’s rights, at first they wanted to look at domestic violence and how domestic violence can influence women and their decisions. And what they ended up with was how women should have STEM…be trained in STEM projects because…and how they should stand up for themselves in the workplace and know what the laws are. It was a totally different direction.

Doris: This was the team, yes, that presented the wage gap between men and women. So this is a great story because what you described to me the other day after I watched them and some of the other teams and I was so impressed with these 14-year-olds who are presenting about the wage gap between men and women and how to solve it. That what you’re describing is really interesting to think about that they started with having chosen a domestic violence and as they…what you said to me was that as they did their research, they realized number one they probably couldn’t solve that problem in a month and number two, that a lot of the root causes for domestic violence have to do with a woman not feeling empowered and not knowing how to self-advocate. And so they then changed or refined the problem they were working on. And that’s how they ended up coming up with the problem of the wage gap between men and women and a solution. I thought that was quite extraordinary.

Pam: I wouldn’t have thought of that.

Doris: Yeah, but they did, through their research.

Pam: They did. They went in a place I would have never gone it was far better than anything I could have ever given them.

Doris: Yeah. So then all these teams you now get them… And you’re right it’s really hard to get them to refine their problems, so that, there’s something they can grab hold of and get their arms around and then what?

Pam: So after they refined the problem and they started coming up with a viable solution was looking at the past of the problem. So they had to take the problem they came up with was the wage gap could be an example, and they had to trace it back through its roots. And that seems like a simple thing but to look at the timeline of an actual historical event or an idea or an issue in this country is pretty big. So like my girls who looked at Black Lives Matter, taking that back through time like they took it back to slavery and then they looked at how we’ve handled issues with racial inequality in this country since then. So it was more refined than just the timeline they actually looked at the nuances that happened at each step and how each step built on so we got to the place where we are now.

Doris: Which is so interesting. So most of the students are African-American themselves?

Pam: Yes.

Doris: And these 14-year-olds are looking at really in a kind of a sophisticated adult way at cause and effect historically.

Pam: Yeah, perspective. So my big ELA standard that I wanted to touch on was perspective. And that’s also part of historical thinking and social studies. So when they were looking like for racial profiling or oh, the Trump presidency was really rich. I thought they would get into that and just be mad.

Doris: Right.

Pam: And what ended up happening was they came up with this…they figured out that it’s…and a lot of the groups figured out that it’s not about how one group feels, it’s about the other groups that are on the outside of that, perspectives that they have. So instead of…they went into it thinking they were going to look at why people voted for Trump and what they figured out was it was looking so they said in our own community in the Black community, we look at it this way. And that we need to change some of our biases, look at our stereotypes. So they created…their solution was this whole thing on a bias. They called it bias, B-I-A-S.  It was knowing you’re…like getting your stereotypes, understanding, like looking at all your information, knowing what you’re talking about that before you just start talking about it.

Doris: Interesting.

Pam: Which is very sophisticated thinking for an adult.

Doris: Let alone a 14 year-old.

Pam: Like for a 14-year-old they had an insight that most adults don’t and that’s…don’t just believe something because somebody said it should be like that. You should get to know the person and understand…and actually every team in its own way kind of came back to that same solution in some way. That there’s another perspective and that you need to understand somebody else’s… If I would have come at them and said, “Hey, you need to walk in somebody else’s shoes,” or done some of those cliches.

Doris: It’s meaningless, yeah.

Pam: It would not have made any difference.

Doris: But they had this problem they were passionate about that, they’d chosen. They wanted to come up with something creative and effective to solve it. And so they had to do a bunch of research to learn.

Pam: They did. They had to understand the past of the problem so that they could work on the future of the problem.

Doris: Fantastic. So somebody who’s trying to teach history in these four weeks you didn’t get to decide what parts of history they were going to…

Pam: I did not.

Doris: Yeah. And did they learn history in a way that you think will stick and will grow?

Pam: Yeah. It’s far more meaningful and impactful than anything I could have taught them, far more. And if they could make connections to the news they would come in and say like, “I saw this thing on the news,” and it’s like so they’re still building forward with the idea that they originally had. And none of them went in the direction they thought they were going to initially.

Doris: That’s interesting. And so I saw half of them present. And I was really impressed. And I was impressed in every dimension. I was impressed with their presentations. I was impressed with how thoughtful they were. I was impressed with how each one of them connected to its historical roots and context. Some interesting things I learned things I didn’t know. I don’t know if you did.

Pam: I did.

Doris: Yeah. And I was impressed with their solutions. They were really thoughtful.

Pam: They were very thoughtful and very doable. That was the thing that was pretty cool.

Doris: So you are a risk-taking teacher. And you’ve been teaching for 20 years. How different has this been for you? You’ve only done it once so it’s early but how different was this for you?

Pam: Well, it’s different for me in every way possible. I’ve never been a by-the-book teacher. It’s I mean, I’ve always created everything that I was doing. And I’ve never used a textbook. I’ve never been a teacher like that. But like you say it’s Deschooling but it’s Deschooling me.

Doris: Yeah.

Pam: It’s not Deschooling the kids. It’s Deschooling me after 20 years of teaching there still is like a kind of a finite way of looking at teaching still like we will all get to point Z by this date and…

Doris: And that’s how you…you’re so indoctrinated to think like that.

Pam: Yeah. There’s a rigidity of it where it’s like you know I teach, I assess, I re-teach, I re-assess and I figure out where we’re going. And this is like I pose a problem. And the problem takes a…there is the intentionality of how I have to do is very different. I still always spend a lot of time on my lessons. But that…

Doris: Oh, it’s a lot of work still, yeah.

Pam: But this is different. It’s not coming up with the answers. It’s coming up with questions. So the question has to be a very different question than what I’ve asked in the past.

Doris: Yes. Yeah.

Pam: Yeah. There’s a lot more why, and how do you know, and then just walking away, and leaving you with it and they do not like that.

Doris: They don’t like it because it’s not…they’re so trained that the way school works is the teacher tells them what to do, they do it. And then the teacher gives the grade. And this is so different.

Pam: Yeah. This breaks all the rules of traditional education and it feels freeing. It feels like that permission to teach the way I’ve always wanted to teach. It feels scary because I don’t have the answer like there’s not a…and I don’t make up an answer key, never been that teacher but there’s not like a right or wrong to this.

Doris: Well, you can’t control the box, right?

Pam: I can’t control where they go with it. And even…I mean, I can definitely assess them through rubrics and different things but it’s like the rubric it still has to be kind of fluid depending on where we go. So I have an idea in my mind when I’m starting. I’m also very tough on myself with who I am as a teacher.

Doris: I’ve noticed that.

Pam: So there’s always that part where I want to do better. I won’t say perfect. But I want to do better. And I want it to be…and I think for me it’s been good to kind of know, I can’t control the better, the better happens because of what they do.

Doris: What they do.

Pam: It’s not about what I do. I mean I can build all the parts around it that will give them support or questions or…

Doris: The pathways, the…

Pam: …pathways the rubrics. The things that will help them know, “Hey, here’s where we want to go,” but where they end up going, is really not…

Doris: And isn’t that kind of liberating for them?

Pam: It’s very liberating for them. This group of girls, most of these girls have been craving this, their whole educational career.

Doris: Talk about that, what do you mean by that?

Pam: They have been waiting for a teacher that would allow them the space to grow as learners. What I see I can think of one group in particular when we were doing the migration. I would just walk over just to do check-ins with them. And they were so intent on where they were going. I’m not going to say I was inconsequential they don’t need the structure. They made their own structure. Like all the things that they did it was very eye-opening to me. I had some girls who still craved asking the questions and wanting a little guidance. But most of the girls they just they want the space.

Doris: So what you’re talking about to me is makes me smile every time I hear a teacher who’s been teaching for years discover that almost as a surprise, right. And it’s because of the way the system of education, the way we set it up we think that we have to force them in some way or trick them in some way or we have to be the pressure that causes them to learn. And then we’re so surprised when we give them meaningful work that’s meaningful to them. We’re so surprised that every one of them is interested. They’re curious. They want to learn. And they will, if you set it up well and you’re there to scaffold the way you’re talking about, they’re going to go further and deeper than we can ever get them to go by muscling them through it, right?

Pam: Yeah, it’s funny for years that I’ve talked to other teacher…like my student-teachers about the carrot on a stick, teaching is smoking mirrors like you have to behind the scenes manipulate things. But this has shown me and it should show every educator, whenever we think, especially, about this generation that they don’t care they’re tuned out. There’s nothing that matters to them, like they do.

Doris: They care a lot.

Pam: They care so passionately. They’re just looking for a way to show that they care. And giving them…there’s a lot of choice in my class the way that it’s structured this year, but it’s authentic choice. It’s not choice that’s a manipulated choice or choose A, B, or C. It’s been very, very open. And for them, that has been…that’s made all the difference because they feel like they’re in charge.

Doris: Yeah. And that isn’t…what’s hard for people to wrap their heads around is that they’re having…working on something that’s relevant and real that no one’s solved yet. And they’re deciding what that is, does not mean it isn’t rigorous. Those two things are completely separate things. And they’re not even separate from the learning objectives.

Pam: No. They’re not. I can hit all my objectives. And it’s completely rigorous. The challenge is absolute there in my class. My principal is very…she wants to see the result of something.

Doris: Right.

Pam: When she’s come into the room my students know what the objectives are like they can tell you and it’s not that they can say robotically like, “We are working on…” They know. They’re like, “Well, right now the perspective of what we’re doing is authentic.” So I’m hitting all of my objectives.

Doris: Content as well as skills, right?

Pam: Content, standards. Everything is in there. It’s just set up different. And it’s not just project-based learning because I’ve done project-based learning for years.

Doris: No it’s not. It’s a very specific thing, isn’t it? It’s weird.

Pam: Yeah. It’s like something beyond.

Doris: Right. And so what we have is a very specific methodology that basically allows the students that kind of spark an interest in learning.

Pam: Yeah. Well, I’m thinking because we just did a thing on system of human migration where they had a current event and I’m thinking like I had a student. She went to this totally different tangent of where I would have ever thought that she would go. But her research questions… Was she going in the direction that would give her the best results? No. Was her thinking the way that she was working through the process of it dead on? Yes. I mean, it’s like…and she’s one of my students that struggles with this the most. She’s one of the ones who’s like, “Give me the answer. I just want the answer, tell me what to do. I don’t…”

Doris: “I don’t want to have to think about.”

Pam: “…I don’t wanna have to think about it.” So to see here completely engrossed in ignoring her team and sharing with me like the amount of research that she did on the questionings and how she analyzed every little bit of this. It didn’t matter to me so much that she went in a “wrong direction.” What mattered to me was that she was engaged, she took a risk, like, she took a big risk. She went with something that she felt in her heart mattered and proved why people had moved out of this country and knew it inside and out. That’s my goal.

Doris: The girls I thought it was really extraordinary to hear what they…after the presentations you asked them some questions? Like why did we do this?

Pam: Yeah.

Doris: Do you think the girls are understanding ‘why’ because this is the tricky zone, the deschooling where a lot of the kids really are not comfortable yet, in this place.

Pam: They’re not. But they can really see that the way that we started out the year helped them understand that history is not isolated. It is not something that just happens. It happens one time. So they could really see that there’s a connection between the past and the present.

Doris: Yes.

Pam: They could…they like the open-endedness of that, they were in charge of their own learning. They like the empowerment, the ownership of it. Even the girls who were kind of freaked out by it…

Doris: Yeah. Yeah.

Pam: …still liked that they were in charge of it. I think they liked having an authentic audience. I mean, I know that’s something that they talked about is having actual people come in and not just presenting to a class or having paper that they turn in and so I’m done. And even though I’ve seen that the last presentation that we did have an authentic audience. I could see the remnants come over from the last one where they’re taking it more seriously. It matters to them more. So I’m definitely seeing they’re making the connection of why we’re doing this.

Doris: So we’re about five weeks into school. We just had an interesting conversation earlier today.

Pam: Yes.

Doris: And what happened?

Pam: I’m trying to figure out a way we can…I’m just trying to figure out how I’m going to teach…my next standard is about exploration and colonization in the 15th and 16th century. And I’ve only taught social studies once in my entire career and taught it very old school.

Doris: Right.

Pam: And so I wanted to… Before this week, we had done a current events project on the system of human migration because I don’t want to teach it just an ‘explore and colonization’ and chronologically, here’s what happened. I wanted them to understand the system of human migration first. So they looked at maps of human migration currently. They chose a country. They did a week-long project to show how human migration works today. And that was good. And I got to this place where I got stuck. And it was the… So you ask the questions about what do you really want them to learn? Because I do get stuck on what I want to teach.

Doris: Yeah. Because your first answer to that question was throwing in front of me these…

Pam: Content.

Doris: …all the content. I want them to learn this content and that content and this content.

Pam: Yes. I don’t know how to teach it. I don’t know how to…and then you’re like what do you want them to learn? They walked away with one thing that you want these 14-year-old girls to learn.

Doris: In two weeks.

Pam: I had to picture a specific girl in my head, and like, what is the end goal? It helped me so much because I know what. I want them to learn the system of human migration. Why people move.

Doris: That’s it.

Pam: It’s just as simple as that. And I was way overcomplicating it. And trying to figure out…

Doris: What you were going to teach, what content you were going to teach them.

Pam: How am I going to get them to know all these things?

Doris: In two weeks.

Pam: Right. Which is hilarious because I just saw these real-life examples of how I don’t have to give them everything, that they figure out…if I’ve posed the questions they have to show me that they can figure out…that it is it’s deschooling me.

Doris: It is because in two weeks you can’t teach them everything about human migration.

Pam: I can’t.

Doris: You can’t. And even if you had them for every day for two weeks and they didn’t have to sleep or eat and you didn’t have to sleep or eat and you could talk for 24 hours a day for two weeks, you still couldn’t do it. And we also know because we have tons of proof and evidence that they don’t retain…that kind of being taught doesn’t stick anyway.

Pam: There’ll be a lot of hot air wasted.

Doris: Yeah. So you churned all weekend and you came in today with all this content. I said choose a girl and you chose one in your class, and you said if in two weeks she could come out of that two weeks having learned one thing what would it be? And you said it really well, why people move. And I went, “Yeah.” And so then when we use that as your starting point, it kind of freed you up to construct something very different.

Pam: Yeah. Yeah. So now they are going to look at the refugee crisis, authentically, like what’s happening. Columbus does have a lot of refugees. They will be able to authentically figure out a solution to a crisis that’s happening.

Pam: Right. This is a relevant thing. And because I mean I have a lot of girls whose families are immigrants. This is not just some…

Doris: Theoretical.

Pam: …’over there.’ Right. It is something that is happening here to our girls. And you pointed out that we have a very vibrant Somali community. So we have not just past European colonization examples that they can look at. I don’t know what examples to look at.

Doris: Because they’ll decide. And they’ll come up with some solution to making Columbus a better place to live if you come here as an immigrant. And in the course of it as an expert teacher, you’re going to be able to push them with your questions to understand the historical context for this, why these people moved here, whoever they choose, and also to look at other examples in history.

Pam: Yes.

Doris: And what is your hope in two weeks that they’ll come out with?

Pam: I think that, honestly, from looking at what migration studies look like in college, it really will have the same background knowledge as a college student who studies the sociology of human migration. I mean, it’s not the way that this shifted in the project that it’s shifting into is something that they will really care about and that they have people in their houses that are rich sources of information of how you come to a new country and understand something. And looking at…like that’s an authentic way to look through the lens of history and why did people come over, what was it like when Columbus came to, you know, but it’s not just like, “Hey, Columbus came and all this and stuff happened.” It’s, “Was that a successful example of a migration? Was it not a successful one? Why was it…? That could we learn from that… whether it was successful or not successful? Were there successful migrations in the past?”

Doris: So in two weeks these 14-year-olds, instead of, what you were coming in with which was your lots and lots and lots of research are around the content you’re going to throw at them they are out of these two weeks each and every individual student is going to have done a different…their own personal exploration journey following what is most compelling and interesting to them, making their own discoveries, and coming out of it with that nuanced more sophisticated, understanding that, “Whoa, the reasons people move are many and they’re complicated and they look…they’re all different kinds of things.” And how great is that?

Pam: Well, if I were an employer in the future or a college doing admissions and I had kids who could critically think, who can analyze things, who can work in teams, these are so much better than regurgitating some historical facts or regurgitating the fact that, you know, this happened on this date and this…

Doris: When people look at this kind of education which I think is more rigorous actually than traditional school and they ask yeah, but well, that’s great that they’re engaged, but what about learning history, and what about learning critical thinking, and what about learning writing, and those academics?

Pam: They are still doing everything that you just said. There’s way more critical thinking. I can say that for sure compared to what I’ve done in the past. I love being a writing teacher. And so that part will never go away but I can get them to write so much deeper and they actually care about what they’re writing about, versus it’s just an assignment.

Doris: Right.

Pam: And the curriculum? I’m hitting all the content in the curriculum I need to hit.

Doris: That’s awesome.

Pam: I mean it. There’s no part of what I’m doing as leaving anything behind. It’s so nice how parents come into open house and then they…the parents see the challenge, they see what their kids are working on at home and they are supportive of it, your principal walks in, she’s supportive of it. You have kids who are complaining because your class is challenging so you know it’s rigorous…

Doris: That’s a good sign, yeah,

Pam: Right. There’s no part of what I’m doing right now that I go home at the end of the day and question and say and I really wish I would have done that better. Like I am learning to let go of perfectionism with education in that class because it was free-flowing. It’s a fluid class. There’s not…

Doris: Because it’s all about the individuals in the room.

Pam: Yeah. It’s not about me. And it’s not about me.

Doris: That’s right. Yes. And you know what I’m going end there. And I’m so proud of you. And this is a lot of fun. I’m having fun with you.

Pam: Thank you. This was amazing.

Doris: This is great.

Alison: Hey, Doris.

Doris: Hey, Alison.

Alison: How are you?

Doris: I’m great, how are you?

Alison: Yeah, I’m feeling really good coming off of this workshop in Slovenia. We had 27 educators from 13 schools across the country who came to Ljubljana, which is their capital city, to learn some of these methods and take this work back to their schools. It was pretty inspiring.

Doris: It was really inspiring.

Alison: Why don’t you take us back and share with our listeners the journey that led us here?

Doris: Yeah, I would love to. It’s really interesting because it all comes together as a little snapshot of what we’re seeing happening around the world, but it’s a lovely story. So several years ago, I got an email from Janez Gorenc, an English teacher, a high school English teacher in Slovenia in a city, Novo Mesto, and he had done research, he was looking… Now this was years ago, and entrepreneurship education, which seems  almost mainstream now. A few years ago, it was really rare to come across anybody talking about entrepreneurship education in K-12. It’s really happened…this whole thing has really happened very quickly. So when Jan-,… I got this email from a high school English teacher in Slovenia who had done research and found Steve Blank’s blogs about what I was doing and the entrepreneurship class I was teaching at Hawken School. You know, we set up a call. He wanted to talk to me and that’s when we met over Skype several years ago. And I was immediately struck by his… Well, you know Janez, he’s an extraordinary guy.

Alison: Absolutely.

Doris: He’s a passionate, compassionate, incredibly kid-centered educator who really wants to change the world in Slovenia for kids, and I immediately saw that. And he had been doing research on his own about how he could bring something into his teaching that would help students develop skills. He felt like our education system wasn’t equipping students to succeed once they got out of school and he came across this whole idea of entrepreneurship education and became really passionate about bringing it to Slovenia, starting with his own experimentation and practice. So we started talking years ago and sharing and doing what people do when they’re experimenting with something new, and he actually came over to Cleveland to one of our workshops. And has been, for the last few years, bringing entrepreneurship education into Slovenia in every way he can. He, with… I believe he has a podcast earlier in our season, so I’m not gonna try to go through all of this because I am afraid I might get it wrong and I think anybody listening, after you hear this episode, if you haven’t listened to Janez’s earlier episode, you should to hear his journey.

But he started a “Startup Weekend” for teachers in Slovenia. He actually took on being an entrepreneur himself to experience it. He started a club at his school because it was really not accepted yet to have any kind of an entrepreneurship class as an academic course, so he started a club. And that’s really hard work because you’re trying to get students to volunteer to do something that, as he told me many times, when they show up for this after-school club and they start getting into it and they realize that it’s really hard work, you know, he loses a bunch of them. But the ones who stay and stick it out, he’s had extraordinary success with. He’s brought teams to the U.S. who have qualified for and competed in international entrepreneurship competitions, he’s experimented with using real problems in these teaching methodologies in his English classes, and he’s started a community and a movement within Slovenia along with some others, and we met them, who are banding together to bring very different kind of learning and teaching model into Slovenian K-12 education. So Boris Kunilo, who sponsored us and hosted us, who runs Spirit, which is an agency that puts on, I think we heard, 30 different workshops for students and teachers a year…

Alison: That’s right.

Doris: An extraordinarily passionate man who is banding together with others to really change education in Slovenia. We met with Maja Krušič Šega, who heads Entrepreneurship in Education in the Ministry of Education. Totally passionate about bringing entrepreneurship into Slovenian education and she’s working with her counterparts in several countries, right? Wasn’t she…

Alison: That’s right. She mentioned Portugal, Luxembourg, and Austria, right?

Doris: Yeah. And… So these people are together, along with several others we met, actively working to create programs for teachers and for students where teachers and students experience the entrepreneurial process. Sometimes in an academic setting, sometimes in a separate program, but always connected to the learning, to the skills, to the process. And facing… You know, they’re facing the challenges that, you know, everyone who’s doing this and trying to do this is facing or tends to, which is the word “entrepreneurship” has a lot of negative baggage associated with it, as we know.

Alison: Right.

Doris: And people hear “entrepreneurship” and they think, “Ah, it’s about business and money-making and profit.” And actually, entrepreneurship education really isn’t about business or money-making at all. It’s about skill-building and problem-solving, and turning problems into successful solutions. And, you know, one of the things I found really interesting when we were in Slovenia was to hear people talking about the bumps and bruises and obstacles and hardships they’ve had along the way because of the misconception among academic circles about what this movement’s even about.

Alison: Absolutely. I think that’s an interesting point you’re bringing up, as well, because I think a lot of these countries are looking to enter into the global economy in the same way that our own country’s talking about being competitive and having the next generation really prepared to go out into the workforce and add value and solve the problems that we’re facing. And so they’re having these conversations at these wider levels, but once it’s actually then being positioned inside the school or needing to be adopted by school leadership or the teachers, they’re facing very similar challenges.

Doris: Yeah, and actually I experienced this with others that we’ve worked with for years. In public school districts in other countries, but I also experienced this very personally at Hawken School. Because even my own faculty, many of them, interpreted entrepreneurship to mean marketing. I mean, I’ve heard that many times. “All right. Why are we teaching…why do we have a marketing class?” And that’s incredibly… If you’ve ever been inside a school and you understand the way academics work and the way departments work and the sort of, the politics of academics and… You know, this stuff is, politically, really, really tough stuff, and I experienced it in my own little world in my school, and I was the Associate Head of School, so I also had an advantage in a big way, politically, and it still was tough.

Now as people saw what the class actually was, and more important, as they saw the students come out of the class and rock it in their traditional classes and… Really, teachers choose to teach because they’re all about kids. And as the teachers saw the kids come out, they realized this isn’t a marketing class. This is something very different, and they, really, everything changed, but the reason I’m going on and on about this is that we just came from Slovenia, and we met with the people who are bravely, courageously and with an incredible amount of energy and resilience and stubbornness, actually, bringing a very different model of education into Slovenia. They believe in it, they’re doing…they’re working it in every way possible with students, with teachers, with administrators. They’re putting on the programs and there remains in most of Slovenian teachers, and probably most of Slovenia’s citizens, this visceral reaction to the idea of entrepreneurship education that is not helpful. It makes it really hard.

Alison: And what was also encouraging is that from the wider perspective of the types of teachers that were there… art teachers, math teachers, language teachers, history teachers, again, kind of opening up, seeing the value of entrepreneurial education, again, as a vehicle, not as a tool to teach business, but as a vehicle for building these competencies and skills in students that they feel is really important for the trajectory of their country.

Doris: Yeah, and I agree, and that’s what we’re seeing, right? We’re seeing that… And this is what’s so exciting to me and the reason the time for what we’re doing is really appropriate. We’re seeing that first grade teachers are coming to this. You know, high school math teachers are coming. None of these… Well, there were a couple people there who are teaching entrepreneurship, but out of 27, maybe 2, and the rest we’re all…

Alison: Psychology, science, across the board, really.

Doris: Yeah, and so whether you call it project-based learning, you know, PBL, or you call it entrepreneurial education or whatever you call it, what they understand pretty quickly on the first day, and we see this consistently in all these workshops. Pretty much by the first morning break, everybody in the room understands, “Oh, this isn’t about entrepreneurship. This isn’t just, you know, PBL.” This is about doing school completely differently.

And what I loved about this workshop, unlike some of our others… You know, in our others, when we can, I make sure that we have a sense of who’s coming and what they, why they’re coming before we actually, you know, before the workshop because for me, personally, I only wanna do these. They’re pretty intense, they’re really immersive, and the goal is to get people doing school differently. So having somebody come who just wants to be a spectator and clap at the end and say, “Oh, that was cool, that was a great workshop. Thank you,” isn’t really interesting to me.

So in this case, we didn’t know who was coming before we showed up for this workshop. Just the way it worked, Spirit offers these workshops. Anybody can sign up for them. And we didn’t know prior to the workshop who was coming, and they didn’t know much about what they were coming to, I would say. Would you agree with that?

Alison: Yes. I believe that there is some description around methodology, entrepreneurship education, this, that and the other, but generally speaking, they were not coming in with as specific goals as we’ve seen some of the other educators we have trained.

Doris: Exactly. Yeah, and you’re right. They knew it was for K-12 teachers and they were going to learn a methodology of teaching and entre, …right. So almost immediately… You know, I’m obnoxious, and I immediately sucked them in and made sure everybody in the room over the course of the first day was identifying where in their practice, in their program, they were going to do a pilot. And you mentioned the psychology teacher, I thought she was extraordinary. She was really struggling the first day trying to think about where and how she might implement this in her class. She teaches, I think, five classes of psychology. Everybody’s required to take it. She teaches 16-year-olds in a very small town. She said it has a population of about a thousand.

And she was one of the last ones in the room to figure out where she would pilot, and you could see her, you know, her forehead scrunched as she was concentrating and trying to figure it out. And then we had a session and she came up with… she knew what she was going to do, and she was going to get a first responder, who’s the only first responder in her village… You know, the guy who I guess shows up if you call the Slovenian equivalent of 911. And he was going to talk to the students about the kind of stress that he has associated with his job, and talk about himself. And then the students, she was going to put them on teams and have each of them come up with a plan for him to manage his stress, and they were then gonna present it…they’re going to present it two weeks later. And in the course of that two weeks, she’s going to be able to guide the learning with her questions so that the learning objectives she has for them, which are many, some of them content-based having to do with psychology, some of them, other. She’s going to make sure that they learn what they need to learn about psychology in order to come up with a really solid, you know, science-based solution.

And that was a good example, but so here we are. We’re in Slovenia and we have 27 teachers show up to this workshop. And by the end of this workshop, everybody in the room was not only committed to trying something completely different in their teaching, like a crazily, radically different method, but had a really well-defined and detailed idea of what that pilot was gonna look like, where and which class they were gonna do it and when and what they were gonna do next. And we’re now gonna have these pilots sprinkled out over the next several months, as you put it, in 13 different schools in Slovenia. That is gonna do more to educate Slovenian teachers and citizens about what this kind of student-centered learning looks like than any advertising or anything else we could do.

Alison: Absolutely. And I think it’d be great if we share now some of the feedback and reflections from some of those teachers from the workshop itself as well as some students and Janez. We had a bunch of people who were able to share a bit more.

Doris: Wonderful.

Alison: Yeah so we’re going to hear from Andreja Prescar, Jasmina Horvat, and Matic Pilko from Srednja Ekonomska Šola Ljubljana as well as Maja Okorn from Primary school Šenčur. All of whom are educators and one administrator.

Andreja Prescar: I think it’s very great experience for us. I came here to see the Korda Method, because over the last five years, each year we made entrepreneur projects. We also know this method can be used in other subjects. Because we are not making entrepreneur, we teach children how to live in real life, live in the future. I think this is very important.

Jasmina Horvat: I’m Jasmina. I’ve worked for five years on this kind of project. We are doing something which student identified with our schools. And we’ll do solving problems, creative. I don’t know what will be the result but the process is important.

Matic Pilko: Hi, I’m Matic. And yeah, basically why I’m here is because I like to teach in a new way, in a new direction because the 21st Century brings us a lot of new technologies, a lot of new problems, and the students have to learn how to see problems and then how to solve them. That’s basically what Doris is doing. So I was really grateful that I could hear her ideas. And I would really like to connect students with companies, real problem, real solution, and real experience. And also, it’s good because they see that they can do it. They can do it and they will do it because their real life will hit them hard in a few years and these skills that we are doing, this stuff really matters. They got the real experience, real skills that are useful and that is what they will bring to community, to the city of Ljubljana.

Maya Okorn: I went to other workshops but these two days really were something different. Not only because of this practical work, which was really intense, but also because it really opened my mind and I really got this pilot for a project in school, so. As a teacher, I see kids and, actually, they’re not doing anything meaningful. And it really…I was really thinking of it. I’m thinking of it every day, because I’m saying, “Look, what are you doing?” “No, we’re just here waiting.” And the problem that kids will be the one that really solve the problem properly because that’s the real problem. I was thinking those kids should involve…we should involve some parents, some local environment. I hope, I mean, I think they will solve the problem in sort of way and I really hope that we will make it real in our school. And that will be something that it will be a part of our curriculum or whatever. So, but for the kids, I really hope that they will make this personal experience which will change them and, I mean, like self-esteem and stuff like that, so. This is my goal.

Alison: Let’s hear from some students as well. We have Larson Cundrič and Rebeka Udvanc, who are going to share more about their experiences.

Larsen Cundric: In Slovenia, when you say the word “entrepreneurship” everybody gets scared. So the first thing, entrepreneurship is not something scary. It’s a very good thing. It’s that you basically learn teamwork and how to make an idea work or come from an idea to a real product. They shouldn’t promote it as entrepreneurship in school. I mean, they should promote it as teamwork or something like that. But I think they promote more…they promote being individual. They like making something alone, but they should be promoting teamwork. And that’s a huge thing that the school system in Slovenia is lacking right now. Everywhere you go you end up in a team. I mean, even teachers need to collaborate with a certain, like…be a teacher, you want to do things alone. Everything. I mean, you’re not on isolated island. I mean, communicate, step outside of comfort zone, get to know other people, team up with them, make something great.

Rebecca Udvanc: I learned that I can do things by myself and that I’m not just one of many others who just repeat after everyone else and do what the teacher tells them. But I can make ideas on my own and I can do some projects, sell them, learn things, and really accomplish things that I would never even dream of. I think that’s better because if you do something because you want to do it, you lead with your heart and with your inner motivation, and you’ll do it much better and learn much more. It makes you feel that you can do something, that you’re powerful to do anything you want. And yeah, I learned that and I want others to learn that too.

Alison: And finally let’s hear from Janez, the Firestarter who brought us here.

Janez Gorenc: Okay so my name is Janez from Slovenia, from actually from a small town, Novo Mesto, where I teach English and I try entrepreneurship at a high school. I’ve been teaching English for, like, this is the 22nd year and entrepreneurship for about 7 straight years. And while I started off in my first school, and I started without any structure, I just thought I knew everything but I found out I didn’t know everything, I actually knew nothing, I started learning all these different methods that I tried to implement. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t. And until I read in Steve Blank’s blog about the Korda Method, actually what Hawken was doing. I then was kindly invited to come to Cleveland, to the workshop. I went there, changed my view of everything, actually.

So I tried to implement it in after-school classes. It worked wonderfully but not as I would have liked. So, also tried to implement it in my English classes. Some classes it worked wonderfully, other classes not so much. So when I… I’m probably one of the few privileged few people who had the opportunity to be at two workshops, two Korda Method workshops. And this one, actually, has opened up completely new perspectives, again. Even though I saw some, I heard somethings for the second time, it’s better to hear them twice than never. But also, it gave me more structure, more details, you know, the minute details that you will need when you want to do teamwork. Not that I didn’t have structure before, but somehow it all got watered down, like, they didn’t know what to do, what the first step was and what the second step was. And necessarily I would have to go there and say, you know, “You have to do this and this and this.” And it would require sometimes too much study, too overwhelming, and they just didn’t do it the way I would have liked. So this new approach, I’m hoping, I can overcome some of that. And then, maybe, at a certain workshop, who knows, I’ll learn some other stuff. Yeah, constant learning.

So yeah. Besides working in my school I’ve also worked with projects outside my school. I’ve worked with primary school kids with many different teachers, great, great teachers. I must say I’m honored, to be part of a team that has also done some workshops, started weekend workshops for teachers that have, in a way, transformed also their experience, their teaching methods, in a way. Also, one of the administrators of an informal group, it’s called, in English it would be “Edupreneurs.” It’s a group for teachers who are just trying to be entrepreneurial in the educational system.

Why is it important? Well, why I entered into this, why I started doing entrepreneurship? Because I wanted Slovenians to become more entrepreneurial, to have more great businesses, and that is all great. But in the process of learning, in the process of trying to, you know, come up with new methods, I found out also what Doris Korda also says very often, that entrepreneurship is also a great vehicle to teach other stuff. So you have…on the one hand, you bring up kids, you train kids to be more entrepreneurial but at the same time, they will learn stuff through the challenges, authentic challenges, things that really matter to them.

So, you know, all of this didn’t come at once to me. I had to do it step-by-step and say, “Ah, look. This is where it works but it also works over here.” So in Slovenia right now, we are, we might be, in a sort of a transformation period. The Ministry of Education also is getting into this big time. Big, big time. And they’re hoping, and I’m wildly excited about this, they’re hoping to, in a way, bring this entrepreneurial mindset, entrepreneurial classes, in a way, they don’t yet know how, I think, but they would like to bring it into all schools from primary schools, secondary schools, universities even, which is a great, great opportunity to basically transform schooling, transform education on the national level. We can do this. We’re a small nation. Not too different, you know, quite egalitarian. So it can be done, I believe it can be done. I hope I’ll be a part of it still in the future.

Thirteen school that were here. So, as I said, many of the teachers that… I’ve worked with many teachers that have been to Startup Weekends and gone back to their schools, done some things. I believe many of these teachers, perhaps, lacked structure, maybe. So now, what they’ve started here is a pilot project that they would like to do at their schools. And this pilot project actually has the backing of an institution that is formal that is, wow, from the United States, which is a big thing, really. And this, I hope, I’m hoping, will it be the start? Well it never… I don’t know what the future holds for us. But I’m hoping that it will be, yes. Thirteen here and then 23 and then 230 and then slowly it might spread. Not to all schools probably, definitely not to all teachers. But it will spread to those to whom this matters and that is what is important. People who would like to do this, and I’m sure there are plenty, plenty out there, will know what to do, who to turn to, and that it can be done in a different way.

Doris: Hello, Michael.

Michael: Hi, Doris.

Doris: So I am really interested to hear what you have to say. But if you could start by telling our listeners a little about yourself and why you came to the workshop, to begin with, and what you’ve done with that.

Michael: Sure. So and as you mentioned, my name is Michael Hudecek. I’m gonna be 35 here soon, which is making me feel old.

Doris: Oh, yeah, old, old, yeah.

Michael: Yeah. So I have a political science degree. I never really knew what I wanted to do with my life and ended up having started my own company, kind of deciding I didn’t want to do that anymore and ended up working for a community development corporation in St. Clair, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Cleveland, running a Youth Entrepreneurship Program. And I didn’t have any background in education at the time. I was passionate about entrepreneurship, having just gone through it myself. And I was trying to figure out what this program was gonna look like and our program manager said, “Hey, you’ve got to meet Doris Korda, she’s doing this really cool stuff at Hawken, you should go to her workshop.”

Doris: Yeah and I should say, you know, that before you arrived Burton D. Morgan, here at this foundation locally reached out and asked me to, you know, connected me with James Amendola from St. Clair and said, you know, “I really like you guys to meet,” and that’s when this idea of St. Clair had this idea to create a Youth Entrepreneurship Program and that’s where you came in.

Michael: Yeah, I remember meeting you for the first time in that coffee shop, trying to tease out what your curriculum looked like and being really worried about how things were gonna get set up in three months or so to go before we got started at this point. But again not having a background in education or teaching entrepreneurship, just having done it myself, I was very stressed out about like the meat and potatoes of how this was gonna work, when you said, “Just show up, it’s gonna be fine.”

Doris: That’s right. I remember. Actually, you wanted me to give you, stuff to read. And I said, “Just show up,” right? That’s right.

Michael: Yeah. And to be honest, I read just about every textbook from every other entrepreneurship course I could find in the world.

Doris: I believe it. I believe it.

Michael: Amazon and eBay, buying used textbooks, So I could figure out what’s going on, because…

Doris: I believe it.

Michael: If this lady’s stuff isn’t legit, I need to have a backup plan, right, like the workshops ended four days before my program was ended.

Doris: That’s right. So you came to the workshop and four days after the workshop, your summer six weeks intense immersive entrepreneurship course for these kids was starting.

Michael: Yeah. So and not just any kids mind you. These kids came to us through a collaboration with Youth Opportunities Unlimited which is like a county-wide employment program for young adults in the community and it’s basically a lottery. I didn’t know who the kids were beforehand I didn’t know what schools they were coming from. We were all sort of jumping into this at first with no clue what was going on.

Doris: Yeah.

Michael: Scary on many levels.

Doris: Scary on many levels and I remember you were telling me about that first summer and of course, there’s even, we even have a podcast from the earlier, earlier, season with you talking about what happened in that first one which is really interesting. But now why did you decide to come again and to do it again and what happened there?

Michael: So the exciting part, on why I got really and why I emailed you to come to the workshop again it was because of the amount of change that took place in six weeks in the kids that I saw. And how they were engaged in a way I’d never seen public school kids, even private school kids, not just engaged but passionate about what to do. And these kids most of them had been given up on from an early age because they were in a public school system in the city of Cleveland. And as long as they graduated without getting expelled or hurting somebody that was like a success story. And I knew that it was my job and my role at St. Clair as entrepreneurship manager working in the youth entrepreneurship space to make sure every possible student I could in the city of Cleveland could touch this program.

And I went to after-school programs and public schools and talked about how amazing this was and they have to go and I made sure that there was either scholarships or money available in our budget and we ended up getting six teachers together from Design-Lab High School, St Martin de Porres, and Open Doors Academy. And I kind of strong-armed my way into coming back by saying I really wanted to make sure that I was able to support them and that I really could benefit from another opportunity to experience this in the workshop.

Doris: Yeah, and I think it was really… But how was it sitting through the workshop a second time? Not that there’s a lot of sitting, but…

Michael: No, but it was great as you would go through the core teaching strategies or show examples of how to engage with your students. At every turn, I was able to recognize was that something I did well last year or was this an opportunity for growth? And being able to take notes and sort of highlight the things that you realized you needed to work on because I’d only done this once and you’re learning on the fly, of course, it’s not going to be great.

And I think reflect on my experience the first time and really pick out the things that I did well and critique the things I didn’t do well and sort of hone in on areas I needed to pay more attention to and you too. I think as adults sometimes we forget that we’re constantly learning by doing. And so having opportunity to return to the workshop and kind of pick up on cues, having gone through it once was really amazing.

Doris: And you’re raising a really important point. So I’m now in the fourth year of doing this with teachers from other schools. I’ve been doing it with teachers from Hawken first and other teachers in my department before that. But you came into this with experience as an entrepreneur and the mindset of an entrepreneur. And that is, about how do I take ideas and turn them into something and experimentation, an attitude of experimentation I’ll call it, is necessary.

And so when you came out of the first one you were wildly excited about the impact on your students and I could see the impact on you and the idea in when we think about how to fix school it’s a completely different world now. The education models that we’ve had up until now it’s well-known they’re not working anymore, given the ways in which technology has changed everything. And we’re in a period now of experimentation, we have to be. We’ve got to come up with a completely new model for school and for teaching and that’s innovation. That’s educational innovation. And that means experimenting and iterating and going again and that’s so not part of the culture of schools. It’s not.

Schools are risk-averse. I was talking the other night about how a lot of what my work is about is creating the conditions for risk-taking. And so I think that’s great. That’s what you were doing and then you came out of this and it was phenomenal to have the six folks that you brought to the workshop. They’re from very different kinds of programs. And now we have pilots going on all over public schools in Cleveland. So you did the workshop again. And then you did the class again. Tell us about the second course and what business have you used, and how you set that up. I’d really like to hear about that.

Michael: We had a woman who’d been in Glenville for 60 years, who ran their family business and closed it down so that she could start an incubation space for young entrepreneurs, just like you can’t write a better story than this, right?

Doris: Yeah.

Michael: Running for council has been a mainstay of your community. She’s trying to do something that would help people in their community. And she grew up in the same neighborhoods that you grew up like there’s a direct connection there and yet that was so much harder for me to build the why does this matter over those two weeks, along with all the other stress of it being the first problem. That the second business owner, who was an Asian guy who ran a bike company walked in with his bike stand, with a $30,000 triathlon bike that won a world championship and his product and all the prototypes that he went through and he sort of talked about this is really important to me, this guy right in front of you, I will fail if you don’t help me.

Doris: Yeah.

Michael: His pitch to the students was all about why he as an entrepreneur had his whole life into this product literally, financially, emotionally, time-wise, everything is tied up into this. And if he doesn’t succeed with this, his family is going to pay the price. And they got that immediately, in a way that even though there was a connection on the first one that seemed so obvious to me and product was great but the amount of work that came out of just that connection to the brand and then why it was important to him and why what they did came back and then even the feedback that he gave was so great. He was just so encouraging and was able to say, “Man, my engineers came up with the same solutions and they did the research and it was so similar like I should just fire my engineering department and just bring you guys in.”

Doris: Well, what I don’t think people haven’t seen it up-close realize is the amount of work and research these students do, even in a two-week timeframe. And it’s a crazy academic topic challenging. So talk a little more about the kids who came this time and what happened.

Michael: It was amazing. The student outcomes were the same, just blown away at every turn the amount of growth that happens in just six weeks time. Some of them went from being A students who needed to regurgitate an answer to ones who were excited about the opportunity to be given that space. Some people couldn’t even put their name on a sheet of paper because they were just that socially afraid, like their emotional capacity was just so drained from years of being beat down in school as the “dumb kid” and we’ve talked, I think briefly afterwards, about that interpersonal relationship was really one of the things that I focused on the most this year. Last year, I was so worried about me in many ways in retrospect and my selfishness to want the product, being the presentations to meet a certain standard.

Doris: As a teacher, the first time around you’re focused on making sure oh, my Gosh, are their presentations gonna be good? Which is such a natural…yeah.

Michael: Well, and one of the reasons that it’s important for the students to have real people in the room to listen to them, to put the pressure on that, that also reflects on you the teacher, right? I mean I was hired to make sure the summer program goes well. And there’s a ton of anxiety as an adult that goes along with it as well. And so I spent so much time worrying about, making sure the kids had the right content or their presentation was great. And in the year two, yes, I was still worried about that because I think that’s human nature but I tried to repeatedly remind myself that the good stuff happens when you focus one-on-one or with those groups in a very personal way and you relate to them as people who are in this challenge together, right?

Doris: Yeah. The difference, what I hear you saying is that this time around you really understood that keeping the eye on the ball is not keeping the eye on making sure that they get the content so that their presentation’s good, but keeping the eye on each and every individual student and the growth and learning each one has to do. And if you do that, if that’s the thing you care most about, then the rest it’s gonna be the best learning experience for those guys.

Michael: And again, all of them would say and somewhere I have their blog posted, say this is that they realize the value of it even if at times it was so difficult they left feeling like this matters, this program, even if I don’t get all of the complexity of it, I get that it makes me better positioned in my life, no matter what I do from here on out, whether it’s going back to school, whether it’s pursuing a post-high-school career opportunity, interviewing, whatever I do in life I’m better for having had this experience. Actually, one of the young women that was in the pilot I did the first year, contacted me just before the second one happens, “Okay, can I do this again?”

Doris: Oh, wow.

Michael: It was really amazing to hear her excited about wanting to come back.

Doris: Wow, that’s amazing.

Michael: But you know that’s a testament to how powerful it is. And for the first time, really to have that agency to make decisions in a learning environment, is really powerful for kids. And that was really powerful.

Doris: They’re working on work that matters. It’s real. And they’re coming up with solutions in a team and presenting them to people who know their stuff.

Michael: I think the importance of setting up the structure of the class in a way, in which, it’s iterative and they can try and fail and experience that and sort of get back up, but also making sure that the problems are real and that you do your best to convey why it’s important to them. And if it wasn’t that they were concerned about the CEO, they recognize that they were getting to do some cool stuff and learning about an industry they might have no otherwise like thought about, let alone dug so deep that they understood the spectrum of car bike racks out there.

Doris: You know, it’s not a secret that I’m a ridiculous idealist. But I really do believe what John Dewey said, that people are innately interested and curious and that learning itself is something that people are wired to love. He said it much more eloquently than I’m saying it. And that if you as a teacher your job is to engage a student with their interest. And I’ve always felt you get them to trust you. And then you capture their interest and their imagination, the learning will come. And I think this is the first podcast I’ve quoted Dewey because I always hold myself back but I can’t listening to you. You know, he said as teachers you don’t have to engage in trickery. They know when they’re really engaged in the learning and they’re growing from that. Did you feel that with these guys?

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you say it all the time. It’s you stopping telling them what they need to learn and you give them the space to learn the stuff they need to learn and the skills to get there.

Doris: Yeah.

Michael: And if you create the right problem, the learning comes with it. And so I could get up there and talk about target market as much as I’m blue in the face, but until they have to explain to a CEO why they chose this product instead of the other product that they were considering, it’s totally irrelevant to them. It’s like a vocabulary word that they’re never gonna use.

Doris: So Michael, when you think about teachers taking something like this on for the first time, which is a very scary risky thing, what are some of the things that you wish you’d understood before you were really nervous going into it the first time? What were some of the things you wish you’d understood going into the first one?

Michael: I think the first one is forget what you want the kids to learn. And learn more about the kids.

Doris: That’s awesome.

Michael: Slow yourself down and talk to them and have a dialogue both in teams and one-on-one as much as you can. If that means you talk to every kid for two minutes every day or twice a week or whatever the time allows, do it as much as you can. One, the more engaged and the more you understand them, the more they trust you and the more they’re gonna open up and the better the learning will be because they’ll take more risks, because they feel safe. And it will also get you out of your selfish concerns that they’re not learning content, right? Because we, as adults, we are always judged by the end product. And we’re not encouraged despite everybody talking about it to take risks or try things out and fail and learn from that failure.

We’re just supposed to know right away. And I think one of the powerful things as an adult is this is really about creating that same safety that you’re trying to provide for the kids as an adult and remembering like you’re never gonna nail it the first time. I’ve never done this before. I just have to go out there and do the best I can. We talked about that four-day turnaround after the first pilot and even a year later having just gone through it again I had four more days from the workshop, revisited to take things away and then start over. And I messed up a lot of things again and you too and that’s okay.

Just even talking to you now I’m remembering all the things I would do differently the next time. And it’s building in a way and you talked about scaffolding some time and it’s scaffolding the student growth and it’s remembering to scaffold yourself along the way and not expecting to have eternal power from day one. But then you know, if you build a few bricks, that’s a great pilot and that’s okay. And step away and let it be messy because the messiness is where the good stuff ends.

Doris: Yeah. And you’re right. We use the words a lot now about risk-taking and failure and all of that, but the reality is that that is messy and it hurts and we’re not used to it and we avoid it at all costs.

Michael: Yeah and that makes me think too like people always ask like, “What does this look like, what’s the curriculum?” and kind of the point is that it’s really about what do you want the students to learn like you always say, “What’s your learning objective? Let’s start there and build backward.” And no matter how many times you go to a workshop, if you don’t know the box that you have to play with, that you’re a certain school or after school program you’re never gonna be successful because this isn’t and life isn’t about one size fits all solutions. It’s really about taking the time to be thoughtful and tailor things to make sure that it’s the best experience you can provide today. Next year, it’s gonna be a little better and growing organically from that.

Doris: Right. That’s right. As a teacher, you need the tools, but you’re the designer.

Michael: Absolutely.

Doris: And you have to know what you have on your palette. So, Michael, it’s really exciting.

Michael: It’s always great to talk to you, Doris.

Doris: Yeah, same here. One of the educators that Michael brought with him the second time he came to the workshop was Jackie Clemens. Let’s hear what she designed and what she’s doing next at Open Doors Academy.

Jackie: So I actually went to school for public health. I did my final project on homeless use and depression and PTSD. And that is where my first job was. And there I learned a lot. And it was really intense and definitely health-oriented and prevention-based. But I found my passion was just a lot earlier. I did Pre-K for a quick minute. And then I got involved with Open Doors Academy, which is middle school and high school. And that’s where I’ve been since I’ve been in Cleveland.

So we’re an out of school enrichment program. So not a daycare, not a hangout session, we are an academically-based program. We do one-on-one mentoring and coaching with the kids. We’re in the different schools throughout the entire city. We are offering curriculum-based work where the kids are exploring, health and wellness, arts and culture, global social education and then, of course, the school stuff, like tutoring and homework time, things like that.

So I was primarily working with middle school kids. And I had this opportunity over the summer to get a group of high school kids together and try this entre experience out. I have a nice small group. We started off with a nonprofit. We partnered with Negative Space, an art gallery. So it was tough for them to figure out where to start and even understanding the nonprofit. When we were in the initial interview with Negative Space, they were so profit-oriented. When kids tend to think about business it’s like money, my money but it was awesome to sort of see that made that shift and really delve into understanding people, wanting to do things because it’s important. And they’re passionate about it and the business wanted to grow and they wanted to be able to reach more kids, open up more programs and expand their social media presence.

And so the kids had to figure out how do all these things tie together, what are best practices that other places are doing, what are they doing well, how are they making it happen, how are they reaching a broader population. And that’s they did a lot of their research on. In traditional education that’s saying, “Hear my voice, memorize my words, regurgitate and repeat,” isn’t really leaving the kids much room to develop a sense of personal drive. In the real world, you don’t have someone saying, “Okay, here’s your next step.” So it’s hard for them to adjust. And it’s honestly just as hard for the teachers or staff or whomever to adjust too because it’s truly a mindset. But once the kids get into that place and that rhythm, they adapt.

I actually have a quote from one of the kids that I think explains it the best. She had some challenges, to say the least, and was very confused, did not have much like personal drive. And so this will start to paint the image with where we ended on our last day. So she said, “My growth from day one to the end of week three has increased by a thousand, because in the beginning, I was extremely shy and honestly, didn’t wanna do anything because it was hard. Once the second week was almost over I gained confidence. I was still a little shy but realized I couldn’t really change that. I’m really glad I went to this camp because it boosted my intelligence and the things you never knew about grew from a little to a lot and that being an entrepreneur is over the top tough.” So she found a way to overcome obstacle after obstacle and after her group presented and the amount of pride she had, you could see it in all the kids basically. They were just so proud.

So Open Doors Academy shifted their model for high school. And one of the major things that they’re gonna be integrating is this program called Global Education Intercultural Fluency. The kids will work in groups and delve into research about something that feels real to them. And then they’re going to implement a solution, whether it’s local right in their community or beyond.

So traditionally, some of the global education workshops were once a month and it was like oh, it’s brilliant speakers, let’s talk about it, maybe we’ll do some volunteering. And I’m not saying that that doesn’t have its place or the kids can enjoy it, but again this process is about putting it back on the kids and letting them, creating the drive and guide where they want to go with it and what they want to do and making it really meaningful and then conveniently enough, they’re developing all these skills along the way. All too often kids don’t get to taste this drive for lifelong learning really on their own. Oh, good, I got an A on this test, great. Mom hangs it up on the fridge, but to have something that feels so real that you built from level zero and then present in this grown-up adult way it brings them into the future with a sense of empowerment.

Doris: Hey, Terry.

Terry: Hi.

Doris: So, listen, I am really excited to hear more about your search class. And you came to the workshop, the very first one we did back at Steve Blanks house, in his living room, in the summer of 2014. And, you know, we actually communicated quite a bit before you came because you were really doing your homework, I remember, to find a place to go for what you were looking for. And I remember you’re telling me that you were a middle school science teacher at a public school in California. And you really wanted to find ways to excite your students about…

Terry: Yeah, I was looking for…actually I was in the process of creating the search class. Which came about because I wanted to teach innovation en masse and I needed to find, like, ways to do that. And originally the class that I had had in mind was sort of like a science fair class, a science fair prep-class, research, pure research. But kind of thinking back and forth that entire school year and leading up to the summer I realized I really didn’t want to teach that, that what I really wanted to teach was innovation. And then learning a little bit more about what innovation meant, it’s the intersection of science, business, and technology. And so the business part, when it fell into place there, I realized I needed to sort of investigate the business perspective because I didn’t have a business background. I’m completely a science teacher, science person, studied science in college and so on. And so in looking at business perspective, my brother-in-law actually who did study business, he suggested that I look into the lean startup movement.

Doris: Yup

Terry: And from there, from lean startup movement, I came across Mr. Blank. And so I actually emailed him. I emailed him directly about, you know, “I’d like to learn more about this program. I’m a teacher, I have this class that I have in my head that I’d like to kind of fulfill,” and you know, did he have any suggestions for me where I can start because I had no background? And so he actually was the one who said, well I think he actually forwarded my email…

Doris: To me.

Terry: And you, yes. And there at that point was like, “Oh great. There’s this workshop I can go to.” As someone who didn’t have any business background or anything like that but has an idea for using entrepreneurship in a sort of a science elective class. And so it kind of fell in place perfectly timing-wise and curricularly just to be able to immerse myself in that realm of that the business sort of world that I don’t have personal experience with. And so that really just kind of kickstarted. And as I learned more about lean launch pad and the lean startup, I realized it was a perfect fit because essentially the philosophies use the scientific methods to validate all of your assumptions on nine core aspects of a startup business. And it just fell into place at that point.

Doris: Yeah

Terry: Very nicely

Doris: Yeah, no it’s great. And then, of course, the curriculum you built around that, so that’s, you know, it’s like in a science class you may employ the scientific method but how you go about teaching science and teaching the students and getting the students to learn science is all about a whole bunch of other things. And you created a course coming out of that workshop and I remember talking to you in the fall multiple times as you were looking for how to engage the students. And it really was…It’s interesting because you came in thinking you needed to learn about business and that’s what you were looking for. But I actually think this all falls under the heading of innovation.

Terry: Yeah. And I think, especially with sort of as I started in the Fall…so I basically went from workshop to actually teaching the course.

Doris: Yeah, I remember.

Terry: I was able to readily use…like I needed to use disparate tools and sort of, sort of come at it right away with this. And as I started in the Fall, yeah. A lot of things just kind of I realized a few things. One of the things first is that the business part is really is like a scaffold.

Doris: Yup.

Terry: And that scaffold allows students to formalize and they communicate ideas in their head. But the creation, sort of the process of the product design and all that, you know, using technology and trying to figure out which technology would match my students best, that we hammered out throughout the Fall. And I think probably midway, sometime by Winter, I started to realize that the innovation part was great but really this class, at least for my class, was all about learning really deeply about yourself, the students themselves: and how they interact with people, how they communicate with people. And essentially, the concept for me became, okay, you know, we’re really as a teacher my job is really is to elevate these groups of students into teams of students. Otherwise, the innovation just wouldn’t happen. Even if they had a wonderful business and they’re kind of chugging along with the product, the product won’t come to be its full potential if the team wasn’t completely on board. And so then by the Spring when I had sort of my second iteration of the class since it’s a semester long class, I was able to kind of try to focus more on that aspect. And I think since that point, I think that’s been something that I’ve kept in my head as, yes the business is important, yes the learning of science and writing, the literature review, as well as learning the tech and building the product.

But ultimately, none of it will really push itself to its full potential without the team understanding they have to work together as a team. And so it’s been great actually as a teacher…because you know, I get to then consult and advise teams. And I treat each little startup company as a team from the get-go. I tell them how important it is for them to really think of each other as a team and not as a group. And I think semester after semester we’ve seen kind of like, just it’s been more amazing projects like one after another…

Doris: Yup

Terry: So, and it’s all from the same business structure and the same tech but it’s sort of driving home that message that you have to interact with each other as a team. There’s just, you can’t, you can have all the fancy dreams you want but if you want an actual product to be made and communicated well, it has to come from a team mentality first.

Doris: Right and that’s where all of the approaches that we’ve built that have to do with teams having a real challenge that they’re…that they find meaningful…

Terry: Right.

Doris: …with a deadline where they have to come up with a solution and all that, all those approaches around collaborating productively, feedback, how you give each other feedback, what…how you identify your strengths, bring them to a team, identify, all that stuff that we talk about, that actually is the most powerful part of the whole thing.

Terry: Right, and I would agree with that because the science, the business, the tech, at least for search class, really in order to see it through to its maximum potential that one semester can offer the students, they don’t have that much time actually. And so if they cannot coalesce together, if they cannot resolve their conflicts sooner than later–and they realize this at the very end of the experience–that you know a lot of time is wasted. But then at the end, they realize, “Oh, you know what maybe it’s better that we resolve these conflicts as soon as they show up. Maybe we do need to kind of, I personally need to contribute more when I see either myself or someone else is kind of drifting off and they’re not being productive, they’re not coming in and helping to design.”

And so I think some of them definitely say in their reflection blogs that they realize that they’re better as a leader like on the side. They’ll kind of be able to be a quiet leader. Some have said they like sort of just being able to be at the forefront and sort of dictating as they go. But they realize who they are. You know, they come to a clearer understanding of, “I’m a talker, I like to actively bring people into the…I now know that I need to actively step up my game because I just I let it go. I let everything procrastinate too much.” And or, you know, “I’m better off on the side. I’m a quiet leader and I see that now.”

Doris: And they see that that has just as much value, it’s just that’s who I am and that’s how I contribute.

Terry: Exactly. And so I think that I would identify as the most important thing that is learned in my class. Even though they do learn business and they do learn science and they do learn all this tech, learning about themselves every semester it just comes back to that. They learn more about themselves that anything else.

Doris: And I would argue that…so that is consistent with every single, you know, everybody who does this and implements in their own completely unique way in whatever class in whatever…you know whatever school with whatever aged students says the same thing. They learn crazy amounts of some particular science or they learned a new technology or they really developed their writing. But more than anything else they learned about themselves. And the, what’s the reason we use you know we overuse these words and I wish there were new ones. But the reason it’s so transformative for many of these students is because they realize the extent to which they’re able to learn, what I can do, how I can contribute. It isn’t this closed conversation between the teacher and the student. Teacher gives student an assignment…

Terry: Mm-hmm

Doris: …student does what he or she is told to do, hands it back to the teacher. Teacher pats on head or doesn’t pat on head, says, “Good job” and it’s done. There’s this, in addition to working on authentic problems, doing the work as a team makes it meaningful and relevant and urgent and they take ownership of what they’re doing in a way that they don’t if they’re just an individual contributor in a classroom.

Terry: Right and even if they’re not, I mean I know…so like the whole project-based learning curricular design, actually I was just talking about this to someone at a conference that I had spoken at, the FabLearn conference…

Doris: Yeah

Terry: …at Stanford University this last, two weekends ago. And I was talking to them about project-based learning. And his…he came at it with, “You know, project-based learning is great. And these kids get into groups and they do this project for what? Two, three, four weeks? And then they’re done with the project and then it’s done. And they disband…and it’s then it’s as if you know they move on to a new project. So it’s as if they really didn’t learn as much because it somehow truncated their learning. You know, it was done, the piece was done, they got their grades, and then they move onto new projects, new groups, and so on.” And we were talking about search class actually and I appreciated his comment on, it’s interesting because when you set it up like this where the kids come up with that problem…

Doris: Yeah.

Terry: …and then they have to pursue the solution. And it’s almost like even after the class is done, there is still reason to move forward.

Doris: Absolutely.

Terry: There’s still…the project is never truly, I mean unless you’re actually going to build your business and start your company, there’s still so much more opportunity beyond just that particular project or that class. And so, you know, it…in some ways, this type of class where students define and then pursue solutions or define the problem and pursue solutions of their own, I think does more to promote life-long learners than simply sort of the traditional classroom group project.

Doris: I agree.

Terry: There’s no, the borders are blown wide open. This project can literally go to as far as you want it to. And so it kind of actively gets students to think about well, what’s the next step? You know, versus a lot of projects, even the project-based learning kind of projects, there’s an end point and then you have to move on. But this type of situation, it’s almost begging students well, what’s your next step? What’s your next step? Well, you know, what do you have in plan next? And there’s always a next.

Doris: Yeah, because it because they’re…what they’re working on is real and it doesn’t just it’s not a, “Here’s your assignment, project or not an assignment. And when you’re finished, you’re finished.” It’s there’s this real thing and you’re building, you’re innovating. And they’re passionate about what they’re doing. We had a student we were talking to today who’s in a space where they’re actively working to define the problem that they’re working on in the music space where the four of them are very, are wildly passionate. And he is crazy excited about the opportunity to work on something he’s actually interested in in a class in school. And one of the things that I think is, this does, is that it when you say life-long learner, it redefines students’ relationships with school.

Terry: Right.

Doris: Because they have this, they come into these kinds of classes before they’ve done a class like this, they come in thinking the way this school thing works and my relationship to school is somebody gives me something to do that I must learn. I then learn it well or not and I get some sort of feedback to tell me whether I learned it well enough or not. And we just kind of rinse and repeat that. And when they realize that my crazily, excitedly learning about and researching something I’m interested in, I’m genuinely passionate about also constitutes learning and can even be done within what’s considered an academic course, that that’s really really, that changes how they look at themselves, learning, and school. And I agree, that opens them up to looking at learning as something they want to do.

Terry: Right, and I think that’s, that’s definitely you know something all teachers want to promote. And sort of redesigning their classrooms, or their curricula I should say, is definitely one way to think about when they want that result. And you know I think that also the, I don’t know. I guess…in some sense, I really wish that I were able to take this class and I think that I probably would have had such a different trajectory in life, as well. But I think…

Doris: Oh, that’s really interesting, why?

Terry: Well, I don’t know. Because I think, for me, I didn’t actually give business a chance. I mean I knew I really wanted to be an educator but that also in my head it never occurred to me to even give business a chance. Or even sort of the startup world where science and technology is pretty much integrated into the business, at least in Silicon Valley that’s where we’re at. It just never occurred to me that I would find a place for myself there. But I’m glad I didn’t. I mean I think in education there is so much to innovate, which kind of gets me to think that I think maybe one of the keys for teachers is in order to sort of help a lot of the teachers out there kind of bring them into this new perspective is that they need to think of themselves as an innovator as well. And that, you know, they may not be in a trendy, high-tech, Silicon Valley startup but that doesn’t mean that you know teachers can’t be those innovators. And we innovate on our curriculum. You know, that’s how we are able to push the boundaries and for ourselves become that lifelong learner too. You know, I just so appreciate actually having the experience now of teaching this entrepreneurship kind of aspect to my class. It’s…you know, I think it’s been a great thing for me.

Doris: You said that beautifully. I couldn’t agree more. And I really will say, I don’t even think it’s about business. I think everything you’re talking about is about innovation.

Terry: Right. And I think that’s where…right, I totally agree. I think innovation, the spirit of innovation, and just the pursuit of it is really critical for student and teachers alike. And…you know, I think coming away from this particular conference that just happened so it’s fresh in my head that, you know, it is a movement. I truly do believe that. It is not just some passing fad or, you know, a maker space might be a fad. The just sort of a room that people go to to drill and to laser cut and to 3D print. But the maker education movement, the sort of movement towards innovation from the teacher’s perspective as well, the…

Doris: Yup.

Terry: I don’t know if there’s an umbrella term for all of it. But that sort of thinking…I think it is something that once started, the ripple effects is just gonna continue.

Doris: I could not agree more. And you said all of that so well. I’m gonna end that here but that was fabulous. Thank you, Terry. And I loved seeing the excitement of your students when I came to visit you. And, they were on fire. And, by they way, learning not only about innovation, and customer development, and pitching and communications but also learning a lot of science. And they were jazzed about it.

Terry: Right. Yes, they can see finally how science is applicable to their lives.

Doris: That’s awesome. Hey, have a great day. Thanks, Terry.

Terry: All right, thank you so much.

Doris: Hello, Regina.

Regina: Hi Doris.

Doris: It is wonderful to talk to you.

Regina: Yes, I’m so excited to be here.

Doris: Well, it’s really exciting to me because we had such an amazing time together at the workshop and that was already two years ago. So I can’t wait. Yeah, I can’t wait to hear what you’ve done since. So, if you could please, start by telling the listeners a bit about yourself and then what brought you to the workshop, and what you did since.

Regina: Sure. Well, I think like many people, I never really planned on being a teacher. I went to Kenyon College in Ohio and there I majored in Spanish and International Studies. And after graduation from college, I had a fellowship and I lived in Mexico and I was doing research at the time. And then I sort of just ended up in Los Angeles at Marlborough School which is the oldest all-girls’ school on the west coast actually. And I thought I would just be here for a little bit while I applied to grad school, but I really loved the school and I really loved teaching Spanish.

And one of the things when I think about it now, when I think about Spanish, is that I graduated from a liberal arts college, and I had a lot of skills, but Spanish was my most marketable skill, and it was through Spanish that I had, jobs in tutoring. I think being able to speak Spanish was ultimately what got me in my job at an independent school even though I was only 22 at the time and had very little actual teaching experience. But what I loved about it was that it was a very real world skill. And, in a way I think that guided me to want to teach a class in entrepreneurship because I found while Marlborough is definitely a college preparatory has a very rigorous academic curriculum and it’s quite traditional in many senses. I felt like we needed more opportunities for our students to leave and to graduate with these real-world skills that they could apply to any job that they might be interested in.

But that’s a little bit about my background. I taught Spanish here at Marlborough for 10 years. And in that time, I also took on the role of Dean of Student life in which I was also in charge of all of our leadership programming. And so leadership is one of those words that can be a bit divisive, and it’s so ambiguous as well, like, what does leadership really mean? I think there’s so many ways that someone can be a leader, and it’s not just limited to students who might have a titled position, or will be on a student council. And so, for about five years actually we grappled with this idea of do we want to have a leadership class? How are other schools teaching leadership? And again, with Marlborough being an all-girl school, are there specific ways that we should be teaching leadership to girls?

And we actually did research, I did a huge East Coast tour and I visited a bunch of schools to see how they were teaching leadership. And we had actually settled on teaching a course and the title of it was going to be Real World Leadership. And we are really excited about it, it was going to be more hands-on and practical, it wasn’t going to be just about theory. And then I happened to go to the OESIS conference in Los Angeles, which I guess would have been in 2016, February 2016, and that was where I met you. And I saw you presenting at that point, and it was then that I had, like, that lightbulb moment and I was like you know what we should call this class is not Real World Leadership. We should just have an entrepreneurship class because all of these skills that we want our students to graduate with, we could teach them through entrepreneurship.

And so teaching leadership has always been something that is a personal passion of mine. I think about my personal mission as an educator is to empower young women and in my case, any student, really, to empower young people to change the world, and I think entrepreneurship allows me to do that. And that’s what makes it really exciting.

Doris: I tell you what is really interesting that you just did in a really brilliant way. I don’t use the word leadership anymore for all the reasons you brought up. The baggage it has with it, and the assumptions others make bog it down and make it not just ineffective, but actually in many cases harmful to whatever point I’m trying to make. And, right?

Regina: Yeah. I mean, I was surprised. I think it can be a really contentious word. And I had never really realized that before until I started to really delve into teaching leadership. But I don’t know, there’s something about it. And I think that too if you tell students, like, ”Hey, we’re going to, we’re offering this new leadership class.” It’s just, kind of, like, Okay, eye roll, here we go again.

Doris: Right. And I think about how for many people this is going to be a gruesome way to say it. But, I think for many people, that word is something that enters into their language as a little kid, as a child. And the way it’s used is very simplistic. ”Okay guys, I’m the leader at this time. Oh, I get to be the leader.” And so, we never get a chance to evolve a more sophisticated definition or use of the word. And it’s more trouble that word when you’re dealing especially with students who are in high school, or middle school kids, it’s more trouble, I found that it’s worth.

Regina: Yeah. Well, because I think leader, it implies just one. And I think we all know especially if this comes out so beautifully in a class like entrepreneurship, there can’t just be one leader or you’re never going to get anything done.

Doris: That’s right, that’s exactly right.

Regina: So I think students are starting to see other opportunities for leadership beyond student council. And I think we’ve moved beyond that idea of there only being one leader. I think students are starting to see leadership as a skill set. And I think they’re also identify saying, ”Oh, well, there’s more than one way to be a leader.  I can maybe be an introvert or I don’t always have to be the one up in front of everyone to be a leader and I think that the conversation has changed a bit.

Doris: That’s awesome. So then you came to this workshop, and I forgot that we met in February at that conference, I forgot that. And you came to the conference and I remember it was a pretty intense thing for you. I remember talking about it with you about coming in from years of teaching Spanish to doing this very different thing, right?

Regina: Yeah. Well, there were a lot of things that were so interesting to me about that conference. One thing that I noticed, and I’ve told a few other people about this, and this is more from my all girls perspective, I’ve been to a lot of education conferences. And at most of those conferences, the majority of the participants are women. And I have to tell you that that, the workshop, I remember we were standing doing the News Circle and I just looked around and I was like, this is the first education conference I have ever been to where there are more males and females because I did, to be honest, I did feel a bit like fish out of water because math is not my strong point. Like the whole finance piece, I’m learning more about that, but I wasn’t a business major.

I took introduction to Micro-Econ in college, and did fine in it, but it was a very difficult course for me and I remember looking around and being like is this a course that I’m going to be able to implement? Because I see all these other people here who teach Econ already or they teach the business course and they just have more experience in this world than I do. But, yeah, your workshop was incredibly helpful for me because it was a big task that I was tasked with, but it was, yeah, it was a fascinating experience.

Doris: Oh, I’m glad, and as you discovered, it’s really not about Econ or Business, it’s about how to create that kind of learning, right?

Regina: Yeah.  Absolutely.

Doris: How to create the course, an academic course where that kind of learning happens. So then, and I actually remember, I mean, this is a couple of years ago, but that even in the course of the workshop, I saw you go from being intimidated to being pretty bold, emboldened I would say, even in the workshop.

Regina: Yeah. Well, it was like the light bulb went off and I was like, okay, I think I can. I’m starting to see how I can make this work.

Doris: That’s right. And then you left, and you tell us what you’ve created, and what’s happened with that.

Regina: Yeah. Well before the workshop, we had the plan. Originally we were going to have a class with 8th through 12th graders. And the goal there was like, “Oh, our older students can mentor our younger students. And this is going to be a great opportunity for inter grade level collaboration and we’re looking for more opportunities to do this.” And I remember sitting there and as we were talking about the curriculum and different ideas, I was like that is not a good idea. I was like, I don’t really see that panning out very well.

And I think during one of the breaks, I actually sent a text message to my division head and I was like, “we need to really think about the schedule because we need to split up middle school and upper school because this is just not going to be the best option.” And so, after the workshop we actually then ended up saying, Okay, we’re going to do an upper school elective for 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. And then, in addition, we’re going to offer middle school entrepreneurship.

So, middle school entrepreneurship ran in second semester of last year, then we had upper school entrepreneurship. And we actually, I mean, the enrollment… I think the word entrepreneurship there’s definitely a certain buzz to it because our enrollment was high especially given that it was the first year we were offering the class. And we gave students the option that they could take the course for an entire year or they could only take it for the first semester. But if they wanted to continue in second semester as upper school students, they had to have done first semester as well. So we did that. We have changed it. I mean, I really do think of starting a new course is also entrepreneurial because, you pivot and you iterate and you try again and you learn. I get it’s all about building, measuring, and learning.

But what we did, yeah, we created, ultimately we created these two courses. I was a little nervous despite going to the workshop. I was like contacting these startups and getting them to work with us, I was like I just don’t… I like wanted to kind of dip my my toe into the water. And so, we actually started by doing a real-world design challenge problem-solving at Marlborough. And so, we had students identify problems that they deemed worth solving. Actual problems in our community. And then we had them pitch those ideas to the senior administrative team.

Then my original plan was going to be that the second project they were going to then go into the broader community and like go within a mile of Marlborough because Marlborough is… we are in Hancock Park which is a very old historical neighborhood but we’re 20 minutes from downtown, we’re by Crenshaw in Koreatown, we’re by Beverly Hills, and so there’s a lot of diversity within… we’re definitely an urban school. And that was the original plan. But then the Marlborough project, it went well and I think it was effective. But I was like I think we could do a little bit more. And I was like and what do you know, this is what Doris said, was, go into a real startup business and you’re going to actually get more buy-in. And so, we then ended up, again, I’m still a little bit nervous.

And so, I had been to this new coffee and tea shop, and the title of it is Rubies and Diamonds. It’s very, hip and trendy and very LA, and it’s owned actually by a parent who is a female founder, which for me is important. Again, I think I’m trying to really develop a program with more of a feminist bent to it, I guess I would say. And so, as much as possible I’m trying to work with female founders. So this was an easy one and I knew her, and I knew she’d be willing to work with us. And I called her right after the workshop in June and was like, mid-October I’d love for us to partner. And she was so excited, and she was like, ”We definitely need more women founders, we need more women CEO. I love this idea. I’m all in.” And she was awesome. I mean, especially for my first time doing this, it was so wonderful to have her as a partner. I think if I had any advice to people it’d be find, it’d be a little bit nervous to find someone who will help you develop this.

Doris: And I also need to interject here that what you’re describing is very common. That people who’ve been educators, the first time you use an external partner to create the curriculum in your class. That is such a foreign idea, that educators are really nervous about it. And I have in the workshops and after the workshops, I actually have to do an awful lot with some of the individual educators to help them just get to that first one. And then once educators have done this once, it’s not hard after that.

Regina: That is exactly true. It’s not hard at all once you do one. And, I mean, what I’ve realized too is now I have people, more, and more people coming to me and saying like, ”Oh, this is great, would you be interested in partnering with us?” And how I’d see it is like, why wouldn’t they want to partner with us? Because if you look at, if you think about high schoolers, and that demographic, and as potential influencers, and purchasers, and consumers, I mean, I see it as then you have this new community of people talking about and potentially getting the word out about your business, which is great for them too. So…

Doris: Well, and also they have for three weeks, or four weeks, or whatever it is, you have a group of students working for a business who are absolutely masterful with all of this stuff that a lot of these business people are most struggling with and don’t know themselves. So the whole, you know how do you market in this very different era? They can add a lot of value. It’s funny because as we’re finding that more and more schools want to work with us to build some of these kinds of programs. And some of them are entrepreneurship programs with businesses, some of them are history classes and they’re using partners that aren’t necessarily the traditional startups but all kinds of external partners. Getting businesses and industry to want to participate with schools, and teachers, and kids is actually not the hard part.

Regina: Yeah. I would agree that is not the hard part. And I think maybe depending on the partnership it depends on what exactly is going to be challenging, but getting them to sign on, and getting them excited, yeah, that is not as scary to me as it once was.

Doris: That’s great. And just to add, the nature of what the students are working on doesn’t actually require that much time from the external partner.

Regina: No.

Doris: So, regardless of what somebody is teaching, so that’s the other thing that I think a lot of people don’t understand until they’ve done it.

Regina: Absolutely. I think there is a bit of… I found I had to work this year when I started reaching out to other companies, I had to do a little bit of work in terms of explaining what type of problem is big enough, and juicy enough that students can really dig deep and actually spend three to four weeks on. But then also not something that’s so big and so complex that they’re not quite ready for it. If I just look at it like the progress, last year I was like, “Okay, I’m going to work with a parent company that a parent owns and like, really dip my toe in.” And then this year I’d love to make a partnership with a VR Company. That’s my next kind of thing.

Doris: Oh, that’s interesting. Well, and I’m going to give you a challenge to think about, just start thinking about this. I think it would be very, very good for you to experiment with some additional learning objectives inside your entrepreneurship class. So, for example, I experimented in the early days with challenges that required students to learn a little bit about genetics and a lot about biology, or a little bit about water treatment and etc.

I think as you dip your toe now into very different, like, I love that you’re looking for a VR challenge. Doing very different kinds of challenges that require students to gain subject matter knowledge that is not business or marketing, but something others would classify as rigorous academics is, and play around a little with that because what ends up happening is that you start really understanding that this is truly a method of teaching and it’s independent of the subject matter. And I think that what that does is it helps your students because they see not only can I do this really hard problem solving, not only can I present and create a cogent, etc., etc. I can learn really hard stuff. And it also puts you in a position to have more impact, I think on other teachers at your school as you see it, it isn’t just its own new silo that’s business.

So it’s very convenient to keep it in the entrepreneurship bucket, and it’s actually much. It’s really actually empowering for the students when schools break out of those, well, these are the core academic subjects. These are the ones that are really academic, and these other things are fun things to the side.

Regina: Yeah. No, that’s a great challenge. I think that is a goal for our next version and that will be a new challenge for me. But I think it will be good for the girls.

Doris: Yeah, that’s awesome. So, you did a great job of describing yourself. You’re an educator. You’ve been teaching inside schools and you don’t have experience being an entrepreneur. It’s not about teaching the girls at your school business. What’s the impact on your students?

And I think that students get really good at doing exactly what the teacher wants them to do. And so, be that, be it a certain style of writing or they get really good at performing for the teacher. And what I love about entrepreneurship is that suddenly that paradigm switch is a little bit.

Doris: So, how is this impacting, how is it impacting your school?

Regina: Teaching entrepreneurship, it really has taken off. Even in the last year, I’ve gotten, I’ve been on a number of email threads of educators who are saying we started an entrepreneurship program. What are you guys doing in entrepreneurship? And I’ve actually had one where someone mentioned that they had been to your workshop, and I was like, yep, that’s the one. That’s what I tell people too. I say, we use the Doris Korda Method, and I’m a huge believer in that.

And we are looking more and more of what comes after entrepreneurship. So they take this intro class and then is there then a Hack for Impact class, or Designing an App for Social Good that could then be team-taught by one of our computer science teachers and by one of our entrepreneurship teachers. But I think this method of teaching does lend itself beautifully to so many other disciplines.

Doris: So Regina, taking it back to where you started this conversation with your mission about empowering young women, does any of what you’ve created here and what you’re doing with this radically new class help you achieve that mission? And if so, how, and in what way?

Regina: Yeah. I think that’s one of the reasons why I feel compelled and driven to really do this work, and to put all this effort into starting this new class is because I do think that out of everything that I have done in my years attempting to teach leadership or in attempting to empower young women, I found last year by teaching entrepreneurship to be the far most effective way to actually do that. And I think it just kind, I think the main thing is, is that over the years I’ve had students come into my office saying things like, I want everything from, I want to start a club to I have this great idea and I want to help the environment, or I want to help solve the homelessness problem in Los Angeles, or I’m really passionate about dogs or cats. I mean, whatever it may be.

And so I think that students especially at this age, have so many ideas and they’re such creative thinkers and they really are driven and they’re passionate and they want to effect positive change in the world around them. But the actual steps of how do you do that? That’s where students need some guidance. And I think that the entrepreneurial model of starting off by saying, “What is the actual problem that I’m trying to solve? And, two is it worth solving? Is this a problem that other people have?” And then going through almost like the product design cycle, I mean, that works whether you are trying to design something for a new skincare product or whether you’re trying to save the turtle.

Doris: Solve cancer.

Regina: Yeah. And I think that what this class that empowers students to do is to say,” Hey I can do that! Whatever problem it is that I’m confronted with be it, I have to do something for my boss, or I just want to solve this problem for me, or I want to solve this problem because it’s something I care about, and I’m passionate about. I know that I can do it because I’ve done it before. You know I had to create a custom drink for Rubies and Diamonds or I had to come up with this new skincare line for Skin House Cosmetics and I didn’t know anything about that yet. There I was four weeks later after doing research and putting in the work.  I presented to the CEO and her team, and I proved to myself that I was able to do it.”

And so, for me I really think that a class like entrepreneurship, it allows students to start with an idea and then turn it into a successful reality. And I think that one of the challenges in education right now is that in most of the academic classes students don’t have that experience of starting with an idea and then actually turning it into something. And I think going through that is incredibly empowering. I think there’s other parts to that… other pieces that you can put into a class. I’m a big believer in that idea of you have to see it to believe it, and you have to see it to become it.

And I think one of the things that I’ve noticed with my students is that they see these other women who had a passion, who maybe followed a really non-linear path to get where they are today. But here they are and they’ve taken an idea and turned it into a successful company. And for them to see that and say, ”Hey, she did it and she didn’t major in business or she didn’t know anything about chemistry or she never thought that this is where she’d be. But look at everything she’s accomplished. I can then do that too.” So I think a class like entrepreneurship also gives you the opportunity to put some terrific role models up in front of your students so that they can really get a better sense of all that is possible and everything that they can ultimately accomplish.

Doris: Well, Regina, I was taken by you in that workshop and I’m not surprised to hear that you’re just doing amazing work for these kids and your school and keep doing it. And I can’t wait to hear what you’re doing a year from now.

Regina: Yeah. I’ll keep you posted.

Doris: Thank you Regina. You’re awesome.

Regina: Thank you.