How important Entrepreneurship and Leadership can be in the school environment

Critical thinking, autonomy, entrepreneurship and leadership mindset is something that students should develop more in their learning process. Creativity is a big key for this and also something that we all in one way or another have in ourselves (some people more than others), but if we never challenge and practise these characteristics with our own selves, it will be more  difficult to create and find successful leaders and entrepreneurs. The aim of this course was always clear, and we tried to facilitate it by giving our participants hints and advice on how to foster motivation in students, how to teach them to deal with failure, be creative and determined.

The course “Teaching Entrepreneurship and Leadership” took place in Palermo from 26/02/2023 to 4/03/2023. We had participants from some various countries in Europe: Antti from Salon Lukio in Finland, Feike from Sint Ursula instituut in Belgium, Jochim and Jeanette from Westminster Law School, University of Westminster in England and with four members from Center of Excellence in Split-Dalmatia in Croatia, Ana, Ruzica, Ivana and Natalija.

Entrepreneurship can be interpreted and defined from a lot of perspectives, with this said, we started to absorb the erudition that each participant has by listening to them, on what they think entrepreneurship is. With this in mind, we were capable of starting to analyse different types and characteristics that make a perfect and not so perfect entrepreneur as so the various methods and mindsets that they use to lead a team or to concretize their goals. We concluded that one very important point in entrepreneurship and also something that should be implemented in the student’s heads is demonstrating that failure is something natural, everyone fails and people learn with mistakes. If this culture ends and starts to be more normalised, students will achieve more confidence to express their thoughts.
Also on this first day, the participants had the opportunity to evaluate their entrepreneur potential from an online questionnaire and right after they put themselves as entrepreneurs, by selling in a very convincing way, why any student should apply to study in their school. We gotta say that we hear very convincing points from everyone!

In order to understand the ideas of each entrepreneur, as conditions to go forward, in the second day we presented a model called SMART (this one, tries to understand in a very complete way if the goal is achievable) and another one, more related to organising plans on how this process is going to be developed, the CANVAS model. Our methodology in every course is to provide the interactiveness with all the participants. We do that with some activities to give them the opportunity to express their knowledge with each other. The activity that standed out the most was with the second model mentioned, CANVAS, where the teachers had the chance to choose between two companies and had to explain the business process with this model.

One thing that is to bear in mind as an entrepreneur is creativity. This feature gets richer by putting someone in a position where they really have to use it. Having said that, we did some activities to exercise this part for every participant. Fortunately we saw many teachers developing this task very well! 

The world is surrounded by bosses, but not every boss is a leader. By saying this, we analyse what distinguishes them, also what defines a good one and the good attributes that can give to a team. A leader is not someone who gives you orders, but is someone that encourages, teaches, accompanies and helps you to find the track for the good success of a group. We hear from the participant’s leaders that they admire and the reason for choosing these noticeables persons.
Finally, we look over for a very important skill in an Entrepreneur, assertiveness. By this, we tried to explain that a person with this skill is better balanced from someone who only is passive, passive-aggressive or aggressive. Especially from this last one, which is very different and shouldn’t be confused.

At the end of this week, we ended with a sensation that time was a little short for these participants, only because everybody contributed and gave us so many interesting perspectives that we felt it could extend a little more. But, we believe that all this knowledge will be very well implied in their countries!

​Discover more about this course here.