Entrepreneurship For Teachers: UM Offers Unique Course
ANN ARBOR -- Imparting entrepreneurial skills to inner city teachers is the goal of a first-of-its-kind intensive course offered jointly by the University of Michigan's Center for Entrepreneurship and School of Education.
Next week, 20 UM master's of urban pedagogy students who are Teach For America Detroit Corps members will take part in the Education Entrepreneurship Workshop, taught by Moses Lee, assistant director for student ventures at the College of Engineering's Center for Entrepreneurship.
"I'm seeing a lot of innovative, passionate people come into the school system, but it takes more than just energy to turn things around," said Monica Rodriguez, high school Spanish teacher and 2011 TFA Detroit corps. "Teach for America doesn't normally take the kind of edge that I'm hoping this class will take."
When Teach For America returned to Detroit in 2010 after a seven-year absence, it was confronted with one of the nation's lowest-performing school districts in reading and math and a city rapidly losing its population.
"It's an entire system that's deficient," said Rodriguez, who joined TFA Detroit in 2011, after first serving in the City Year Detroit corps. "As a high school teacher, I'm getting students who are at a third- and fourth-grade level. At some point you have to ask what happened along the way."
Common issues that TFA corps members face include lack of parental involvement, poor communication among leaders and educators, truancy and low student motivation, said Kendra Hearn, clinical assistant professor at the UM School of Education and coordinator of the Teach For America interim certification program. Hearn said this course is a first for TFA across the nation.
During the week-long workshop, participants will learn the tenets of social entrepreneurship: how to identify problems, assess needs, solicit feedback from customers, solve problems in creative ways and execute a solution with limited resources. They will also work in teams to brainstorm creative solutions to the real-world problem of student motivation.
The course was Hearn's idea.
"I'm somewhat misplaced," she said. "I've read the popular business reads of the day and I'm always asking, are there any implications of this way of thinking to education? It's in my nature to think outside of the education box."
Although commonly thought of as a teacher placement program, Teach For America is also a leadership development organization committed to providing intensive training, support and career development to help leaders increase and accelerate their impact and deepen their understanding of what it takes to close the achievement gap.
"Sixty-five percent of TFA participants tend to stay in the profession as policy makers or administrators, instead of classroom teachers," Hearn said. "TFA's change theory is that they will take the experience they had as educators and apply what they learned to what they do in the future. Whether they stay in the profession or not, they can be change agents."
This course will help them on that path.
"People might think, 'Why would entrepreneurship skills be necessary? Shouldn't they learn how to teach?' In my opinion, we need more entrepreneurs thinking about reinventing education," said Lee, who will teach the class. "Students in the course will be able to use these tools to approach problems in the classroom and have immediate impact when they go back to school."
More about the Center for Entrepreneurship at http://cfe.umich.edu. More about Teach For America Detroit at www.teachforamerica.org/where-we-work/detroit. More about the School of Education Urban Pedagogy Program for Teach For America Detroit Corps at www.soe.umich.edu/academics/masters_programs/tl_tfa.
