Video: Pathway to Entrepreneurial Learning via Solutionaries

A few weeks back I wrote a blog about my frustration as a 12th grade IB teacher.  Like many of my fellow 12th grade teachers can attest to, student effectiveness drops of a cliff in second semester.  So when my students suddenly came to class excited and inspired by the Kony 2012 campaign (a global movement to arrest the Ugandan warlord and war criminal Joseph Kony), we were all disappointed when after a quick discussion we had to return to the IB curriculum.

Now, by no means am suggesting that the IB curriculum is inadequate or too restrictive, but I think as educators we should challenge ourselves to continually look for ways to harness our students’ enthusiasm to increase learning.

The other day a colleague of mine, who I had discussed this idea with, passed along this Tedx talk by Zoe Weil.  In it she discusses the idea of teaching our students in a way that  gets them to not only learn about and identify problems, but create solutions.  She goes on to introduce the idea of Solutionary Teams, groups of students who compete with each other to create solutions to identified problems.

Take a look:

Now whether you agree or disagree with her views on Humane Education, I think the idea of empowering students to choose their own focus/curriculum in a class is very powerful.  Obviously it’s easier said then done, but definitely worth pondering and worth an experiment.  As a social studies teacher I see many practical applications and horizontal collaboration opportunities, but see some big school wide opportunities too.

For example, many school organizations (NHS, CAS, StuCo) vie with one another to raise funds for charity donations, projects, etc.  Although there is value in students creating their own mini-fundraising idea, I think there is a powerful opportunity to create a unified school wide fundraising focus.  Imagine students competing to support a certain cause, and integrated into the plan is marketing needs that are created in tech or design classes, quality control research studied in science, math or social studies classes, market penetration and effectiveness covered in businesses classes, etc.

I believe the idea has a lot of potential for good not just in the classroom but in the community as a whole.