Burton D. Morgan Foundation Awards $100K to Support Entrepreneurship Education

In addition to supporting the development of a digital platform to support the Educators Program, the grant will also provide workshop scholarships for educators in Northeast Ohio.

 

Hawken pioneered a new model of entrepreneurship education for high school students in the fall of 2013 with its semester program in Entrepreneurial Studies. The model is designed for students to master 21^st century skills and learn deep knowledge by solving real problems on teams. In Hawken’s semester course, students have an opportunity to work with local entrepreneurs who provide them with real and urgent startup-type problems complete with hard deliverables and deadlines. In the final portion of the course, students use their knowledge about entrepreneurship and team-based creative problem-solving to create their own startups.

 

The program’s early success inspired Program Director Doris Korda to launch the first Educator’s Workshop in the summer of 2014. The workshops are hands-on and limited in size. To date, 90 educators from across the nation have attended the workshops in California and Boston, designed to prepare teachers to build, launch or refine entrepreneurship or problem-based programs at their schools. This summer, Hawken School will offer an Educators Workshop in Cleveland, at its urban extension campus, The Bob & Sally Gries Center for Experiential and Service Learning in University Circle.

 

At the workshop, educators are immersed in a shared learning experience with attendees from public and private K-12 schools and colleges as they develop courses suited to their programs. Participants leave the workshop equipped with Hawken’s Educator’s Toolkit, a resource full of our materials for attendees to use when they teach their own courses. Following the workshops, Hawken teachers continue to mentor attendees via phone/Skype and meeting consultations, and educators from across the nation are developing a professional network to support program implementation and best practices.

 

The generous funding from The Burton D. Morgan Foundation will enable Hawken to increase access and affordability for the Educators Workshop, to further develop entrepreneurship and problem-based education locally, and to increase the number of students participating in educational programs grounded in Hawken’s real problem-based learning methodology.