Entrepreneurship at IES Arca Real: EntreComp into action

On 15th September 2021, at IES Arca Real we were invited as speakers to the kick-off meeting on "PROMOTING ENTREPRENEURIAL CENTRES OF VOCATIONAL EXCELLENCE", which is an initiative under ETF ENE project. The main objective of this initiative is to support the establishment of a partnership in the thematic area of Entrepreneurial Centers of Vocational Excellence (Entrepreneurial CoVEs) and entrepreneurship excellence as a key competence.

I tried to explain how we work entrepreneurship in our school, and what are our plans for the coming years, since we will be having an entrepreneurship dedicated classroom. Here you have the link to the presentation in Canva, but below you can find most of what we explained at the conference

We are a secondary, VET school based in Valladolid. We specialize in the business administration area, so we could say that entrepreneurship is part of our curricula: our students are expected for example to know how a company is set up and how to elaborate a business plan. But also now, 50 schools in Castilla y Leon are going to develop their students entrepreneurial competencies according to EntreComp, by creating entrepreneurship dedicated classrooms.  Since we follow the EntreComp definition of entrepreneurship, we expect our students to be entrepreneurial not only in the traditional sense, to set up a company, or to create economic value, we want them to be entrepreneurial in any situation: from school to innovating in their future workplace or simply as citizens. We want them to realize they are motors of change and can create value and make a better world if they keep an entrepreneurial mindset.

I am gonna show you some past entrepreneurial experiencies, and some others that we intend to carry out in our new Entrepreneurial classrooms. At IES Arca Real, we have set up a simulated company in a classroom, as a pedagogical tool to train our students in business in a practical way (learning by doing). We get them to run their own company, performing actual business tasks like buying and selling their virtual products all around the world, and getting to know the ins and outs of running a small business. By managing the day-to-day operations of a company, students not only apply what they've learned in a theoretical way, they get to develop Entrepreneurial skills and an entrepreneurial mindset, they also identify career pathways that align with their interests, and talents. You might think: well, it is easy to develop entrepreneurial skills working in a simulated company. But I would like you to understand that it is not about that. It is not about the place, it is about the methodology. The students are expected to show they know about marketing, finance, human resources, customer services, and so on. But they are also expected to be creative, to spot opportunities, to detect problems and propose solutions, to work with other people, to get the resources they need, to mobilise other people, to take the initiative. To face a changing environment, and to learn from experience. And these competencies can be trained in a simulated company, or in a simulated bakery or car repair.

One way of working on entrepreneurial skills is to place the students at the center of the learning experience, for example through challenge-based or project-based learning.

A project that I think could be reproduced anywhere, would be to put students to work on making their school a better place. For example, in my school, we do not have any benches in the courtyard, nor any green areas. We want to challenge our students to be creativeand find solutions for these problems, and act on them:  the students can investigate, build these benches by themselves, look for materials they need, or collaborate with other centers specialized in wood to get them to build them. Also, they could mobilise natural science teachers to help them create green walls or investigate what has been done in other schools. And also, we want our school to be sustainable, but our students and teachers have nowhere to leave their bikes. What about building a parking lot for bikes, collaborating with other centers, or reusing materials that may already be available in the center? I don't want to be tiresome repeating the competencies again, but in all these projects the students would put into practice vision, creativity, valuing ideas, self-knowledge, motivation, mobilizing resources, mobilizing people, work as a team, economic and financial education, working in uncertain environments, taking action, ...

Before I have shown you one of the simulated companies that we have in the center, but one element of the EntreComp definition is missing, which is "creating value for others". So I want to set up a new simulated company, which will create value for the students, by improving their training, and also for our closest environment. Unlike the other simulated companies we have at school that create fake products, SociALL will provide a real service to our community. We are going to help our community with our digital, social media and marketing design knowledge:  we can create communication campaigns for our school, which sometimes needs to communicate projects; we are going to help small businesses in our neighborhood with their marketing products such as brochures, posters, social media, and we want to help design attractive resumes for unemployed people in our community, students, or ex alumni. This way the students will be able to see that it is possible to benefit themselves, that they will gain real experience and training, and at the same time create value for other people.

Finally, I just want to share with you some tools we have created to share with other teachers trying to develop Entrepreneurial competencies in their students, one of them is in Spanish, but I wouldn't mind translating it if you find it is useful. 

This is a  tool that has been created for anyone who does not know anything about EntreComp to have all the basic information and resources together in one place. It is in Spanish, but I do not mind translating it for you, should you find it useful. In fact, I am already working on it.

This is a tool that links to a Google Sheet for each of the 15 EntreComp competencies, with all the threads, proficiency levels, and learning outcomes. The sheets are designed to be used together with CoRubrics, which is an add-on for Google Sheets  that helps teachers in the assessment process. CoRubrics automates the entire evaluation process. I did share this tool before with all Open Space members (see post here)

Feel free to contact me should you have any questions or comments, and have a nice day!