Experiential entrepreneurship

I have been troubled by the teaching of GCSE Business Studies, largely because the syllabus emphasises the entrepreneurial element while my students have no real experience. Scanning papers for another reason I came across an article by Jarna Heinonen and Sari-Anne Poikkijoki (2006) on the Emerald website. This was a review of approaches to teaching entrepreneurship using experiential and entrepreneurial activities. The paper also includes an annex containing a number of classroom activities that demonstrate this.

I liked the idea of using somewhat left-of-field approaches that allow students to explore their attitudes individually and as part of a team. Currently, I am being guided by a set text book, which uses real world (or at least realistic) examples, the down-side being that my students have no basis to judge this realism against which ultimately bores them.

This article has encouraged me to try 'unrealistic' examples which may have a better experiential content.

Reference

Heinonen, S., and Poikkijoki, S-A. (2006). "An entrepreneurial-directed approach to entrepreneurship education: mission impossible?". Journal of Management Development. 25(1). 80-94.

Term end

The last couple of weeks have been fairly horrendous and I can't say that I am particularly well motivated to teach at the moment. A truly amazingly complicated and 'petty' system of writing reports (I had over 50 to do) completely dominates life for teachers for the last few weeks of term.

I am amazed that we (teachers) allow ourselves to be dominated by a bureaucratic process that insists on the most inefficient and error prone option - individual reports for each student, in each subject. It is impossible to control style or layout and it is very difficult to tell if a report is missing or not - a teacher may simply have mis-titled the form tutor's name.

Although I'm tired and wouldn't make any important decisions due to that fact, this is a big enough issue to make me consider leaving the post. Which is crazy. I just want to teach! And part of teaching has to be effective feedback to the student, which seems to have been completely forgotten in the process.

Herzberg would certainly identify this as a 'hygiene' factor - unless administration is good it can only de-motivate. I have enough to do over the Christmas break, but I will draft a new work flow for reports that better meets the needs of students and teachers. I am just not doing my job properly if I don't.