Enterprising Approaches to VET:
Discussion Starter....

Some Starting Points
* see Editor's note

What is meant by ‘enterprising ways to teach and learn’?

Enterprising teaching and learning will require or encourage students, not simply to ‘learn enterprise’, but to use their enterprise in learning any part of the curriculum.

A less enterprising approach, on the other hand, will ‘rob’ them of the chance to use their initiative, be resourceful, make decisions, solve problems, look for opportunities and take risks in the way they learn. These less enterprising approaches can, in fact, permanently ‘de-enterprise’ students.

Generally, learning is more enterprising if it involves greater degrees of

• student ownership
• experiential learning
• cooperative learning
• reflective practice.

Enterprising Learning is a modern pedagogy concerned with the attainment of standard curriculum goals: an attempt to make teaching and learning more engaging, more purposeful, more relevant, more effective and more value-added. And as a by-product of learning in this more enterprising fashion, students practise and develop powerful enterprise capabilities.

Enterprising Learning, then, has two basic aims: one, to achieve standard curriculum goals more effectively; and two, to develop the learner’s enterprising capabilities. Combined, these will increase the chance of the learner becoming a self-starting, independent learner for life.

By learning through enterprise, students are ‘doing it’ all the time and across a rich range of contexts. This is the crucial ingredient for the development of complex, transferable capabilities - the ingredient which is most often missing in attempts to develop generic, higher-order skills. Without it, practising enterprise will remain an occasional, disjointed event which has only a marginal impact on the bulk of the student population.

Small Print

Generally, enterprise can be seen as operating at two levels: the ‘small print’ level and the ‘big print’ level.

At the small print level, an enterprising ethos pervades the curriculum, the pedagogy and the school organisation. The environment is such that students are automatically given responsibility for authentic experiences. At every turn, students are encouraged to work with one another, as well as with people from outside the school. There is a constant expectation that the learner will play an active and prominent role in assessing the quality of performance and outcomes. The culture encourages self-starting, life-long learners. It is small print because the approach does not appear ‘obviously’ enterprising.

This enterprising culture pervades not only the curriculum, but also extra-curricular areas. Students play a dominant role in managing clubs and societies, library services, canteen operations, maintenance services and sports teams and events.

But enterprise is not just about the students practising their enterprise. It is difficult to imagine students developing an enterprising attitude in an un-enterprising environment, with un-enterprising role models. This means that all the staff must be enterprising in everything they do - particularly the way they manage resources, solve problems and seek opportunities. Teachers are powerful role models: if they are to have a positive impact on their students they must both model and esteem enterprise.

Big Print

The term big print refers to the special activities, projects and programs which teachers use to foster more effective learning, as well as the development of enterprise capacities. These approaches are called big print because they are more overt, more deliberate and more readily recognisable as enterprising undertakings.

Big print approaches include the following:

Enterprise Activities are simulations, games and other structured exercises which involve students in learning their curricula in a more enterprising fashion. These activities are based ‘on reality’ but do not take place ‘in reality’. Activities can be:

• used to prepare students for more challenging undertakings like Enterprise Briefs and Enterprise Projects
• used on their own, to practise enterprising skills, processes and know-how
• used to enhance standard curriculum activities, including numeracy and literacy.

Book Two provides a rich sample of these activities.

Enterprise Briefs are ‘real life projects’ designed by the teacher to achieve standard curriculum outcomes, while requiring the student to practise enterprise at the same time. Although the idea and structure for the project, along with the curriculum goals, are pre-determined by the teacher, once students accept the brief they have total responsibility and autonomy in carrying out the enterprise. Book Three contains dozens of ready-to-use sample briefs, and also advises on designing and facilitating briefs.

Enterprise Projects involve students coming up with ideas for ‘real life’ undertakings: they plan them, recruit and manage actual resources, make real decisions, see them through and deal with the natural consequences. Central to the undertaking is that the students negotiate the curriculum outcomes with the teacher. Some of the curriculum outcomes will no doubt relate to generic enterprising skills, but the main focus is on syllabus outcomes for the ‘host subject’ area, whether it be science, technology or language studies. Typically students are required to identify and present evidences for assessment.

With the stress on ‘running with your own ideas’, Enterprise Projects are more than ‘dress rehearsals’ for work and daily life; they nurture the young person’s sense of empowerment in a realistic way.

Enterprise Passports are idiosyncratic, snappy, colourful accounts of one’s own enterprise. Students produce them to persuade employers and admissions panels of their enterprise. Book One describes passports and their development.

Enterprise Programs usually provide a framework within which a number of enterprise experiences are organised and managed. Perhaps the best example of a worthy enterprise program is the Micro Society model, where the school mirrors the larger society. There is a system of government, a bureaucracy and a free market economy. Some models even have judicial systems. Students run the government, work in the public sector and participate in private enterprise. See Book One for a fuller description of this fascinating approach. A fifth book in the series is planned to deal exclusively with enterprise programs.

Space Capsule

The reality is that small print and big print approaches need to be combined to achieve optimum effect.

Enterprise Means…

In this series of books the word ‘enterprise’ is being used in the broad sense of ‘being enterprising’ in any area of life. It is not limited to the narrow sense of being entrepreneurial in a commercial realm.

The following definition of enterprise is the one we use in this book and the others in the series.

Enterprise is the capacity and willingness to initiate and manage creative action in response to opportunities or changes, wherever they appear, in an attempt to achieve outcomes of value. These outcomes can be personal, social, cultural and of course economic. Typically, enterprise involves facing degrees of difficulty or uncertainty.

(Kearney and Ball 1996)

People who have the capacity and willingness for enterprise can be described as ‘enterprising people’. The OECD definition of enterprising people is widely recognised, has broad appeal and cogently describes such people:

An enterprising individual has a positive, flexible and adaptable disposition toward change, seeing it as normal and as an opportunity rather than a problem. To see change in this way, an enterprising individual has a security born of self-confidence, and is at ease when dealing with insecurity, risks and the unknown.

An enterprising individual has the capacity to initiate creative ideas ... and develop them into action in a determined manner. An enterprising individual is able, even anxious to take responsibility, and is an effective communicator, negotiator, influencer, planner and organiser. An enterprising individual is active, confident, purposeful - not passive, uncertain and dependent.

Towards An ‘Enterprising’ Culture

Colin Ball, OECD Education Monograph, Paris 1989

And entrepreneurialism?

Enterprise is about having ideas and doing something about them, it is taking advantage of what might be, rather than accepting what will be. It is using initiative to make things happen - even when life is difficult and uncertain. In a commercial context or business setting, this is called entrepreneurialism, but you also need enterprise to run a club, to make a film, to run a household or to run a good classroom.

Making It Happen - An Introduction to Enterprise Education

Commonwealth Government of Australia

Enterprising Capabilities

There can be a lot of debate about what attributes actually constitute ‘being enterprising’ - just as there can be about whether these things are skills, competencies, qualities or something else. In these books the term ‘capability’ is mostly used to describe the following elements:

• Generating, identifying and assessing opportunities
• Identifying, assessing and managing risks
• Collecting, organising and analysing information
• Generating and using creative ideas and processes
• Solving problems
• Recruiting and managing resources
• Matching personal goals and capabilities to an undertaking
• Working with others and in teams
• Being flexible and dealing with change
• Negotiating and influencing
• Using initiative and drive
• Monitoring and evaluating
• Communicating ideas and information
• Planning and organising.
• It helps to think of enterprise as existing on a continuum.

Skills …………... Capability …….….….. Attributes

At one end there are the more technical skills like planning, organising and dealing with information. At the other, less tangible end, there are attributes like

· intuition · insight · inspiration · ingenuity · innovation · influence · industry

Words like ‘flair’, ‘drive’, ‘boldness’, ‘courage’, ‘daring’, ‘the knack’, ‘spirit’ and ‘passion’ are also used to portray enterprise as a personal quality. This view often talks about motivations and values, and even psychological traits.

The technical skills underpin the attributes, which are more visionary. Somewhere in the middle there is the notion of ‘capability’, which attempts to combine the usefulness of explicit skills descriptions with the richer notions of personal attributes.

Why Enterprise in Education?

In the past, only a few people needed enterprise: for example, business people, certain managers, those on the land, migrants and single parents. The rest needed little initiative, flexibility or resourcefulness to make a living or secure their welfare; mainly they needed to follow instructions and persevere.

Today, however, everyone needs enterprise. Enterprise is the key factor in determining the success of an individual, an organisation - or indeed a nation.

Young people need to develop an enterprise capability for a number of reasons.

Finding and Keeping a Job

Anyone who has been unemployed in the last decade knows that finding work is a full-time job in itself - a job that requires initiative and resourcefulness.

Once job-seekers find a job, they will only keep it if they exhibit these same enterprising qualities.

Companies today need to be flexible, efficient and concerned about quality to deal with the ever-increasing ferocity of competition. Their workforces, too, have to compete with the workforces of other companies - by being more flexible, more independent, and more creative. It means the whole nature of work is changing.

Until recently, to find the right workers, employers mostly relied on a ‘passport’ of school and college qualifications made up of general education achievements – the most prominent of which was the acquisition of knowledge.

Those same employers then started to look for people who were trained to do a job – people with particular skills that could handle new technologies and help fight off competition. Vocationalism therefore became the second passport to employment.

‘Enterprising’ is the best description available for the type of worker the employers need today: workers who seek opportunities, use initiative and bring about change.

School leavers today are entering a world in which many more jobs will be in small business, or will be part-time or casual - a world where job changes and periods of unemployment will be common.

Self-employment

Today people need to be able to make a job, not just find a job. But there is more to it than that: small businesses create employment for others, not just self-employment. To start up and expand a small business, enterprise is essential.

Contract Work

The idea of permanent full-time staff is giving way to outsourcing services and personnel. Many tradespeople and professionals have always worked like this.

Because of this, business and government are reducing their core workforce. New extra jobs will be created outside that workforce, and will be contractual. This means that people will need a new set of abilities:

• to package part-time and casual jobs into working livelihoods

• to behave as contractors rather than employees

• to see changes in employment status as opportunities

• to pursue further learning and training.

Looking after others

There is a worldwide shift in the balance between what society will do for the individual and what individuals are expected to do for themselves. Rather than directly providing welfare support, governments all over the world provide resources directly to non-government organisations and the individual so that they can take care of their own welfare.

Refreshing Education

An enterprising approach to education can renovate ‘tired’ and outmoded education practices and organisations.

Too often schools are un-enterprising places, with anti-enterprise values and de-enterprising processes. The clear demand to help young people to develop their enterprising capabilities represents a challenge to schools; which, if met, will transform them, and if not, will signal their final failure.

Colin Ball

At one level, enterprise education builds on the great progressive traditions of education to contribute to the development of a modern effective pedagogy that has three main aims:

• to make learning more engaging, purposeful and rewarding
• to equip students to manage their own learning
• to inspire them to become self-starting learners for life.

Enterprise also challenges the bureaucratic structure and culture of traditional schooling. It requires teachers and administrators to seek opportunities, to take risks, to be flexible and to exhibit boldness and imagination.

In short, people will need to be creative, rather than passive; capable of self-initiated action rather than dependent; they will need to know how to learn rather than expect to be taught; they will need to be enterprising in their outlook and not think and act like an ‘employee’ or a ‘client’.. The organisations in which they work, communities in which they live, and societies to which they belong, will, in turn, also need to possess all these qualities.

Towards An ‘Enterprising’ Culture, OECD, Paris, 1988.

 

A Matter of Purpose

Enterprise Education has three basic purposes. Although these purposes often co-exist in individual activities and programs, it helps to understand the emphasis and determine some priority.

Education about Enterprise

Traditionally enterprise education has concentrated on giving students a knowledge of the world of work and business, i.e. learning about enterprise. The focus, however, has been on economics and commerce, with an exclusive private-sector flavour. What also needs to be included is an appreciation of enterprise in the public and community sectors of complex modern societies.

Education for Enterprise

Another purpose is to promote enterprising behaviour and attitudes necessary to create, manage or respond to change or opportunities, wherever they may appear. Traditionally, however, the purpose has been narrow, primarily focusing on the know-how and the attitudes necessary for self-employment or small business start-up. Largely, the agenda has been to dispose young people favourably towards business.

Education through Enterprise

The purpose here is to use enterprising experiences to learn any part of the curriculum. Traditionally, however, student-directed experiential learning has been limited to using ‘mini-enterprise’ activities to achieve business study outcomes, and even this often happens outside the mainstream curriculum.

A more appropriate approach is to achieve outcomes across the curriculum through a more enterprising approach to teaching and learning: student-driven, first-hand learning in authentic contexts.

In a very real sense enterprise education is just as much about how children learn as what they learn.

Ball and Kearney

Which Purpose?

Research in Australia, the UK and elsewhere demonstrates that there is a strong preference among educators for Education through Enterprise, or Enterprising Learning as we call it. Since the approach builds on traditional philosophies and practices of progressive education, it is not seen as a foreign agenda or yet another addition to the curriculum and workload.

As is argued in Book One, outcomes related to ‘for’ and ‘about’ approaches are best achieved through an emphasis on learning through enterprise. It is also maintained that the for and about outcomes are naturally retarded unless a through methodology is employed.

Enterprise ‘Geiger Counter’

Given that learning and teaching can be either more or less enterprising, it is helpful to think of more enterprising approaches ‘emitting’ certain properties which promote engaging, purposeful and valued-added learning: these properties being high levels of student ownership, experiential learning, cooperative learning and reflective practice.

Metaphorically, you can run the Geiger Counter across any learning activity, program or strategy and get some idea of how much it is likely to promote enterprising capabilities. It is also a handy tool for identifying ways to make particular teaching and learning strategies more enterprising.

Ownership

The first property concerns the level of student ownership. Who is mostly responsible for the learning, and who controls it: the teacher or the students? Though both need to share ownership to a degree, generally the more ‘say’ and responsibility the students have for the learning, the more likely they are to be practising their enterprise capabilities.  

Student ......................................…………… Teacher
Ownership

When the ownership is weighted too heavily towards the teacher, the student is often dependent and passive, and potentially disengaged from the learning.

Student ownership can be increased by requiring or encouraging the student to ask ‘Who will learn the most?’ when considering who should accept the responsibility for a learning task. The student is then ‘forced’:

• to make choices
• to make decisions
• to manage the processes
• to negotiate control and accompanying conditions
• to take on undertakings which are challenging but achievable
• to appraise outcomes and their own performances.

Shock of Freedom

Remember, students have been ‘schooled’ into passive learning attitudes and behaviours, where they automatically accept a ‘big mind to small mind’ mentality of teaching the answers; many will continue to take the line of least resistance; and many will not thank you for giving them extra responsibility for their own learning. In fact some are so imbued with the expert-centred approach that they think anything else is a ‘cop-out’ on the part of the teacher.

Treat ownership as a relative matter. Determine their readiness and make incremental shifts, rather than quantum leaps in ownership. Maintain structure and be clear about what is and what is not negotiable.

One thing is clear: students cannot develop initiative, resourcefulness and flexibility unless they actually do these things. They cannot learn decision-making without making real decisions; nor can they learn risk-taking without risk.

Experiential Learning

We now consider the property of experiential learning. Is the emphasis on learning ‘at first-hand’ through more concrete experiences, or is it on learning ‘at second-hand’ through abstractions?

First-hand ........................................................... Second-hand
Concrete                                                                    Abstract

The second-hand learning approach relies on the transmission of theory through experts and knowledge, whereas the first-hand approach stresses active and applied learning through actual experiences.

Of course, learning needs to link both the concrete and abstract ends of the continuum, but where should it start? It is argued that with new skills, with young learners, and with complex, integrative capabilities like enterprise, the preferred starting point is towards the first-hand end.

Though processes and principles can be ‘taught’, the capacity to ‘read’ the situation and adjust processes can only be ‘caught’ through experience - as with confidence and all the other personal attributes that underpin enterprise.

Experiential learning offers two central ingredients, which too often are missing from over-institutionalised learning: utility and audience. (The learning has a real use, and is useful to someone else.) Without these elements, the work of adults would have little purpose or meaning. It is hardly surprising, then, that ‘school work’ regularly fails to inspire our children.

Learning can be made more first-hand by regularly asking the following questions:

• What real-life experiences are available to achieve these learning outcomes?
• Can simulation activities be used where real-life experience is not appropriate?
• How can existing learning strategies be given a useful real-life purpose?
• Besides the teacher, who could be used as an audience for the learning?
• Who, from outside the school/college, can help design and facilitate first-hand learning experiences?
• How can learning be made into ‘applied’, i.e. ‘hands-on’ learning?
• How can the learning be made more contextualised, so that it reflects real-life conditions?

It is also important:

• to avoid an over-reliance on discovery learning
• to avoid locking students into repetitious activities
• to keep undertakings simple and brief
• to ensure that undertakings match the students’ capabilities
• to focus undertakings on required curriculum outcomes.

Cooperative Learning

The third property we look for in an enterprising approach to teaching and learning is the degree of cooperative behaviour and structure. Cooperative learning is happening when:

• students learn with and from one another
• students share learning tasks
• students learn from adults other than teachers.

We know that people naturally learn with and from one another. We know that sharing learning tasks is an efficient way of learning. And we know that people, generally, enjoy learning together. Good teachers, however, do not leave the cooperative nature of learning to chance; they plan for it.

Planned ........................................……................. Unplanned
Structured                                                          Unstructured

They know that the group is its own best resource. They also know, however, that without the ability to plan and organise itself the group will succeed mostly in ‘pooling its ignorance’. Through a planned approach to cooperative learning, students will learn the techniques and skills to organise the tremendous power of cooperative approaches.

To increase the level of cooperative learning, consider the following:

• Encourage or require students to use and study standard cooperative learning techniques like ‘snowballs’, ‘jigsaws’, ‘three-step interviews’ and so on.
• Encourage or require project teams to have an organisational structure with explicit roles, and procedures for decision-making.
• Use students as mentors or coaches of other students, both formally and informally.
• Use senior students as evaluators or reporters for junior students’ undertakings.
• Use senior students as assessors for junior students.
• Arrange for peers to be co-assessors, both formally and informally.
• Make some assessments interdependent, so that students are mutually dependent.
• Use Adults Other than Teachers (AOTs) as advisors, mentors, assessors or partners for individuals and groups.

Reflective Practice

The final property we look for is the degree of reflective practice. How well planned is the reviewing of what happened and the turning of it into meaning, lessons for the future (i.e. theory) - or is it left to chance?

Planned ............................................................... Unplanned
Structured                                                         Unstructured

A common mistake with experiential learning is that too much time is spent on carrying out the experience, and not enough on systematically and consciously learning from it. The processes, the skills and the language of review and reflection are what help the student to ‘learn to learn’, and to treat all experiences in the future as learning opportunities.

Through review and reflection (R&R), students:

• identify key processes and contextual influences
• assess the skills and knowledge learned, as well as the gaps
• learn the ‘critical vocabulary’ to describe processes, capabilities and achievements
• consider how to apply capabilities and processes to other contexts
• learn reflective practice as a critical thinking skill.

Ways to improve the level of reflective practice include the following:

• Separate review (‘What happened?’) and reflection (‘What does it mean?’) to generate clearer reflection.
• Focus on both the process and the content of undertakings.
• Establish clear milestones for R&R events in the life of the undertaking.
• Identify some specific prompts for debriefing.
• Determine roles and structure for R&R processes and events.
• Encourage or require students to use diaries, journals or logs.
• Encourage students to ‘label’ and record findings of R&R in highly specific language.
• Use AOTs and other ‘outsiders’ in R&R processes.
• Avoid a ‘classroom discussion’ format.
• Link R&R to assessment, either through assessing students’ contribution to R&R, or by reviewing assessment in R&R.
• Encourage or require students to undertake a Critical Incident Analysis or to use standard cooperative learning techniques during debriefing sessions.

The following table highlights some of the differences between a more enterprising approach to teaching and learning and the more orthodox traditions.

Table Degrees of Enterprise

* Editor's note: there are several references to Paul's set of books on 'Enterprising ways to teach and learn'. Details of the books are provided separately for the sake of  completeness. Whilst this is commercial  advertising in one sense it is within the VECO guidelines as Paul has provided much information and given of his time free of charge

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First published October 31, 1999. Last modified November 1, 1999.