SCHool Magazine Spring 2022

Page 20

10 YEARS OF NURTURING ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDS CEL Celebrates Its First Decade by Edward Glassman ’03, Executive Director, CEL

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not been our experience. But, as a rule, schools are not a natural environment for nurturing entrepreneurship. In fact, some children who grow up to be entrepreneurs have habits that most schools don’t value. According to Margot Bisnow’s research in her wonderful book, Raising an Entrepreneur, many young entrepreneurs question the rules and challenge authority. They want to do things their own way. They get bored and lose focus when the task at hand doesn’t interest them. This approach doesn’t square neatly with a traditional school environment, which puts more emphasis on remediating kids’ weaknesses than finding and supporting kids’ strengths. But if you can make it work, if you can commit resources and time to supporting and building a student’s entrepreneurial mindset, it connects with every modern pedagogical tenet that we value as educators. Fortunately, that is the exact commitment that SCH Academy has made for the past 10 years. We went beyond just building a Makerspace, despite how trendy that option was at the time. We focused most of our energy on

s the executive director of the Sands Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, I am fortunate enough to work with hundreds of budding young entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers each year. No matter what the project, our mission as educators remains the same: to instill in our students an entrepreneurial mindset. Each day, we create opportunities, case studies, and hands-on projects that challenge our students to become more resourceful, to apply creative problem solving, and to tackle real-world challenges at SCH, in their local community, or even across the globe. And above all else, to be resilient in the face of adversity. The work that goes on in CEL changes lives and sets career paths. It’s so much more than business; it is a powerful framework for the future of education. The most common question I’m asked about my work is “why entrepreneurship?” Some maintain that this topic is not developmentally appropriate for kids, or that it’s too difficult to measure the outcomes. At SCH, this has

school magazine spring 2022

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