As an educator, you’re always focused on your students, but we want to talk about you for a second.
Life may have taken you in a whole different direction but before finding yourself in your present role (or maybe this also applies to you now, while you are simultaneously educating our next group of leaders), did you ever think of starting your own business/being an entrepreneur?
How wonderful was the idea (or is the reality) of being an entrepreneur?
Wouldn’t you want that for your students the same way you may have wanted that for yourself or are living out that dream now?
If you believe, like we here at Explorer Hop do, that all kids should be exposed to the wonders of entrepreneurship early in their development, read on to see our three ways to foster an entrepreneurial mindset in your classroom.
1. Practice Goal Setting
Entrepreneurship is a process. One that requires constant assessment and reassessment of goals and ambitions over time that eventually lead to a larger milestone – ex. opening a store or building an online business. To this effect, engaging your students in progressive goal-setting is a good and simple way to begin developing their aptitude for this habit.
Start by simply allowing your students to write down two things they want to accomplish at the beginning of a month. Then, go back to those goals halfway through the month and change them (adding new ones, erasing old ones or adjusting existing ones) if necessary depending on the student’s progression towards said goals. Finally, look at the goals with your students when the month ends to see what was accomplished and what still requires more work.
Again, the goal here is to not necessarily accomplish all the goals that your students set out to complete at the start of the month but to build a habit for consistent checking, re-checking and assessment of identified goals that will help them understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur starting from scratch later in their lives.
2. Reassure Students That Mistakes Are Okay
You never want to tell anyone, especially a child, that it’s not okay to make mistakes. This becomes even more important when attempting to develop an entrepreneurial mindset with your students because entrepreneurship is never perfect.
Accordingly, continue to reassure your students that it is okay to make mistakes and that mistakes are great learning opportunities, because this will provide an understanding to your young entrepreneurs that they will and should go through a cycle of “the good and the bad” before they get to where they want to be. In other words, they will learn that mistakes are a natural part of being an entrepreneur, and this tip will help you ensure that your students understand that principle very clearly.
3. Integrate Risk vs Reward into Daily Activities
Do you know a single entrepreneur that hasn’t taken a risk? In fact, the very foundation of entrepreneurship is built on risk taking and risk management as you proceed towards a goal.
Teach your students this idea by, for instance, giving them a math question a few minutes before recess. Provide them with this prompt: “I have a question. If you choose to answer it as a group and you get it right, you get five extra minutes of recess but get the question wrong and lose 10 minutes of free time before the end of the day”.
This will begin helping them develop the ability to weigh risk versus reward, a fundamental understanding necessary for young entrepreneurs and experienced ones that will surely encourage the growth of their ambition and entrepreneurial mindset from an early age.
We believe that these three simple tips will encourage the beginnings of a strong entrepreneurial mindset in your students, which can and will only grow further if we start kids on the path towards entrepreneurial knowledge early.
Tips like the ones provided in this post are just the start though. You would never want to encourage the beginnings of knowledge development on a subject and then stall a child’s interest in said subject, right?
Instead, we encourage you to talk to the parents of your students and get them to check out Explorer Hop’s entrepreneurship programming, where we teach children in grades 1 through 12 all about marketing, finance, business operations and sales as we aim to further grow the ambitious passion for which you have laid the foundation through our tips from this blog!