I’m beginning to see that we are living at the edge of a very unusual time in education.  My students helped me discover this today by introducing me to a documentary on Joseph Kony the Ugandan warlord. By now you may have heard of the Kony 2012 campaign designed by the US based non-profit Invisible Children (If not I’ll post the documentary at the bottom).  Since the videos initial release, just earlier this week, over 60 million people have viewed it.

Suddenly students who were never interested in Central African war atrocities want to discuss and learn more about the topic.  No doubt this is partly due to the nature of the story but it’s also a testimony to the effectiveness of clever branding and brilliant marketing.  Over the last few years there has been a steady increase of viral marketing and attempts to raise awareness through social media, but none have seemed as layered and effective as the Kony 2012 campaign.

So how does this relate to education?  As I watched the inspiration rise in my students as we discussed this topic I see an opportunity to capitalize on their motivation.  In fact it seems more and more normal for my students to be keen marketing commentators.  I’d like to follow their motivation and see where we end up, but there’s one big problem, this is IB history and May exams are right around the corner.  So instead of harnessing my student’s ambition and seeing where it takes us I have to get my students ready to be assessed.  Anyone who teaches 12th graders in the spring knows how difficult it is to get the their “lights to brighten” so it’s frustrating to let this moment pass.

Instead I propose a new concept in teaching, let’s call it Entrepreneurial Learning.  Lets let the students set the agenda and we’ll do our best to facilitate.  I already try to do this through Harkness discussions (a model of discussion created by the Philips Exeter Academy), but we need to go further.  This generation already has the tools to make its voices heard, we just need to help provide the focus.  Jeff Utecht, the tech coordinator at International School Bangkok seems to see this and speaks about it more at his blog here.

Of course to do this would require and entirely new way of thinking about education and may be too risky for many schools.  Still we can incorporate entrepreneurial learning into our schools through extra curricula’s and fundraising.  For example we ask our students in National Honor Society, student council and CAS to raise funds for various projects, but instead of pushing them to come up with a multi-layered dynamic and inspirational funding campaign we tell them to sell brownies at a bake sale.

For years educators have been talking about the power of collaboration and I can’t think of a more powerful way of collaborating then setting a common big goal together as a school and incorporating it into the curriculum.  Maybe your school should tackle funding improvements in poor health care for the children in your nearby community, mosquito nets, etc and let the different courses build the campaign.  Art can design, business can build the marketing plan, science can study the benefits, social studies the impact on the community, etc.  Students will learn as they contribute and like entrepreneurs you’ll create a service or solve a problem that needs addressing.  This is what many of our students will need to do one day anyway.

It’s time to ditch the brownies and challenge our students to think bigger, much bigger and the truth is they already are, we’ve just been suppressing it.