We've spent seven weeks brainstorming, forming teams, establishing a business model, writing business and marketing plans, having meetings, making changes...and with one week to go in the quarter, we are so close to the go-live date for our 5 businesses.
When I began the blog, I called class an experiment in authentic learning. As I've stated so many times on my personal blog, If You Ask Me, we must make school different for kids--now. We must provide them with real chances to take risks (and fail or succeed), real reasons to get work done, and real opportunities for reflection and growth. As the weeks have gone by, I have been thrilled to see how much authentic learning is happening. The students in the class have learned about business terms, tools, and processes. But more importantly they've learned that starting a business is hard, that adults don't always reply to emails, that websites are challenging to make, that colors evoke different emotions, that teamwork is harder than working alone...they've also learned a lot about things specific to their own businesses--the Pucker Up team never imagined they'd know all of the types of ingredients in lip balm before this class began!
I know there's a lot more for us to learn, especially as we go from plan to action and the businesses try to run, but I'm already sold on the results of this experiment.
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