Schools are the necessary players for educational change where education transformation initiatives must be developed.
“Our task as teachers is to provide education to our students that will enable them to face the world which is different to the one we know and which will be different to the one that we know”. Teachers must always remember this idea when planning the education that will be provided to students.
What will be necessary? Several reports (“Future of work”, 2019, and “The Future of work – OECD”, 2019) increasingly coincide stating that, in addition to the content, students’ skills will make the difference: critical thinking and resolution of complex problems, creativity, collaboration and teamwork, emotional intelligence, leadership, readiness and adaptability, bargaining power, initiative and entrepreneurship, effective oral and written communication, information assessment and analysis, curiosity and imagination, and service orientation.
A multilateral strategy is required to face that challenge. The OECD is already working on a number of key factors in the educational models to be developed: coherent and transferable curricula, with multiple options for students, interrelated content, high flexibility, and commitment from both the students and teachers.
Entrepreneurship at the Best Schools in Spain
The necessary education transformation requires time and effort but this implies changing the basic concept of education, which is more complicated. However, above all, it requires schools, as the change agents, to take steps in that direction. By introducing entrepreneurship requirements, subjects and activities in our schools’ curricula, we can work on all the aforementioned factors in an environment which, rather than making them mandatory, make them necessary.
To take a step further in that direction, most of our schools are already working on this type of experience with the aim of including all those perspectives in different situations and subjects and at different times:
- Entrepreneurship subject during Secondary or Baccalaureate Education: business projects are drafted based on global challenges and exponential technologies, which the students can present in public. Among other features, students learn how to analyse and develop clients using client empathy and matching maps, and process, service and product analyses; in addition to those areas, the schools also work on the basic concepts of corporate communication and marketing, online and offline design, human resources and costs.
- Optional entrepreneurship subject: an optional subject for younger students will enable them to deal with personal and professional issues: domestic, personal, professional and business matters. The aim is to prepare students so that they can creatively resolve challenges, problems or projects.
- End-of-year projects: based on the students’ own interests and aimed at contributing to a global challenge, such projects stimulate students and exercise their thinking, self-management, communication and social skills.
- Entrepreneurship activities – Start-up days: these activities give students the opportunity to develop business ideas for global challenges such as health, security, energy, space, food and education. Facilitators, mentors and specialists in different areas provide support to help them validate and develop their ideas and present them in public.
- Work placement programmes at organisations and companies: the aim is to enable students to experience work commitments and labour requirements and find out about the variety of existing opportunities.
Education in the very near future will require methods which foster the students’ active participation and the teachers’ well-informed guidance. At the Best Schools in Spain, we build a trust relationship which provides students with an effective learning process and equips them with sufficient confidence to overcome obstacles.
