Entrepreneurship & Innovation Course

📍 Chicago, Illinois

Curriculum & Pedagogy Design

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou

Project Overview

Entrepreneurship & Innovation, a course that I am both teaching and developing alongside students, aims to dispel the myth that some of us are born creative, while the rest are not.

Through project-based learning, students are tasked with a diverse array of challenges that push them to cultivate their interests through creation.

Project Sequence

As you scroll down, you will travel with us to Garcia High School. The following sections feature aspects of the course's planning process, tools and activities that characterize our classroom, and different projects that have defined the first iteration of this course.

Arriving at Garcia

Nestled in Chicago's industrial corridor, reaching Major Hector P. Garcia High School starts with a trip down 47th street. I invite you to virtually walk to school with us!

An invitation: In Google Street View, set your cursor to the 47th and Pulaski Rd intersection and head West on 47th. Passing the panaderia and tortilleria, you will arrive at our doors! If you'd like a shortcut, click here.

Planning Backwards: Exploring Our Scope & Sequence

On Friday, August 12th, just under a week before the first day of the 2022-23 school year, I received a call. "Are you still interested in teaching a business course?"

Jumping at the opportunity, I affirmed my eagerness and we quickly began creating the foundation for the course entitled "Entrepreneurship & Innovation." With input from students, fellow educators, former colleagues, and the Stanford d.school's K12 Lab (via Ariel Raz), this co-created blueprint has set the stage for a semester full of learning and iteration!

Grba - Snapshot (Calendar) 2022-2023

Think of the "Scope & Sequence" tab as the course's foundation as it was initially brainstormed. From each category, day to day activities and projects are nested within weekly slides.

Examining Our Classroom Toolkit

Building a Weekly Color Palette

At the start of every week, I select a unique color palette to help communicate the passage of time and to visually enliven the slides that we engage with. Here are a few of the palettes that we have used this year (from weeks 1-13):

Setting an Agenda

After settling in with a song, we review the class session's agenda to communally establish where we are heading and why we are heading there.

Warm Up Activities

Just as a dynamic stretch can help prepare our bodies and minds for a myriad of physical activities, we involve student and instructor interest in a collective warm up activity to cognitively ease into the class environment.

Structured "Unpredictability"

While structure can help reduce uncertainty and anxiety, our class involves a mixture of instructional and classroom activities and methods. Paper, Post-its, Chromebooks, paper planes, Legos, and half-sheets create options for students to express themselves and their ideas in unique formats.

Locating Relevant Challenges that Motivate Us

Summative - Problem Statement

Understanding the Problem Space

After exercises focused on identifying challenges around us, and using data to help deconstruct those challenges, students broke into teams to "problem statements" to help better understand a problem that they felt particularly relevant or important to them.

Students selected problems and challenges including:

College tuition prices and the impacts of student debt
Food waste, and its impact on the environment
Exorbitant consumption patterns in the United States
Online entertainment impacting and shaping human attention
Housing prices rising faster than income
Healthcare affordability for the insured and uninsured

Generating Insights from Interviews

Gathering Peer Data on the School Lunch Experience

As an additional component of our "Problem Space" module, we discussed and workshopped the importance of interviews in collecting authentic, human-centered data as we identify relevant problems and challenges around us. Inspired by the Stanford d.school's K12 Lab resources, I adapted human-centered activities via Peardeck, digital platform I frequently use to create interactive slide decks. From there, students directly charted their 30 minute lunch experience.

A selection of student responses can be observed here:

Prompt slide

Superimposed plot of student responses

Selection of student responses

Students then interviewed one another, using a template interview slide as a note catcher for their partner's responses. Upon completion, I synthesized the trends from the data that the students gathered and presented them to my classes the next day.

Initial Interview Template

Classroom data demonstrated that ~43% of all students do not eat school lunch at all

Generalizable Student Data - After conducting an analysis of students' responses, the following trends in responses became clear:

Learning through Prototyping

Developing Lego Toy Prototypes

As we have moved into the "Solution Space," I have prioritized introducing lessons and activities that provide different entry points and methods for engagement. In this activity, students designed their own toy prototypes, and calculated the costs involved with building each prototype before determining a sales price.

Centering Student Interest with Business Design

Building Our Own Businesses

By providing students the opportunity to create their own businesses during different activities and assessments, students' creativity has helped drive engagement and curriculum relevancy. Below, I have highlighted the student crafted logos to their distinct businesses:

Suburban Talks (Podcast), Secreto (Apparel), Pedro's tacos (Restaurant), Sage Café (Coffee Shop), Techos (Apparel), Pawerful (Pet Apparel), El Chivo (Restaurant), Simple Pens (Accessory)

E-Translate (Application), Zone Out (Apparel), MAXport (Wireless Laptop Charger)

Building Community Partnerships

Below is a visual support included in an email I sent to the Greater Chicago Food Depository in early September of 2022. This message kickstarted a partnership-oriented project where students will collaborate to support a community organization in tackling an ongoing challenge.

Official Logo

Query - 60632 Zip Code Food Bank Partner Locations

Learning Alongside Students

Moving into the "application" space, our classes will begin working on a project in collaboration with the Greater Chicago Food Depository - located less than four blocks from our school.

About the Depository - "In 1979, six people came together and opened the first food bank in Illinois with a mission to bring hope and end hunger in our community. The Food Depository has since grown to support a local network of 700 pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and programs that help us advance our mission to end hunger." - About the Chicago Food Depository

The Project's Vision - During a conversation with Amy Laboy and Andy Seikel of the depository's leadership team, it became clear that communication would be a central focus of our project. Specifically, our classes will be focusing on how to help effectively communicate the different programs and offerings of the food depository with the surrounding community, especially the community's youth.

Ideas, Inspiration, Sounds, & Partnerships

Brainstorming Entrepreneurship & Innovation Updates

As the semester develops, I continue to build on and draw from an ever growing collection of ideas, inspiration, sounds and partnerships. These categories represent different aspects and influences of an iterative process - one that I hope to continue developing and growing throughout this semester, and during the second semester of this school year with a new cohort of students.

Thank you Dr. Susie Wise, Kat Holmes, Kokoroko, Yussef Dayes, Flippity, and Gimkit. Of late, your work, art, and platforms continue to inspire me in the classroom and outside of it!

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse