Can you teach students to think more like entrepreneurs?

Teaching students the skills they need to become leaders and innovators is more important than ever

When you think of imparting entrepreneurship skills to students, most educators will likely go the obvious route — how can we teach students to build successful businesses that will help them in their post-graduation careers. But there are also a host of skills that successful business leaders use every day that can help students no matter what path they choose.

“Most schools that are working with this topic are teaching students to conceptualize new ideas and build business plans around those ideas—or to actually go out and create a company,” said Cheryl Lemke, who is president of the Metiri Group, an education technology research firm. “We think that’s a great idea for a subset of kids, but you’re probably not going to reach every child by doing that.”

In her many years of studying 21st century skills, researcher Lemke has identified five key skills that are essential to becoming a successful entrepreneur. She describes these skills as tolerance of ambiguity, calculated risk-taking, persistence, evidence-based reasoning, and self-direction.…Read More