2019: Claymation

By 2019, Entrepreneurial Thinking and Action had become a fundamental part of who we are at Lincoln. We’d partnered with Babson College the year before and had members of the Lewis Institute visit our campus for three days to introduce us to their model of entrepreneurial education and the EPIC curriculum. They helped us understand the differences between predictive and creative logic, how and when both were useful skills, and facilitated a variety of exercises that left us knowing that this was the direction that education needed to take to provide our students with the tools they need to be successful change-agents in their world. We continued that relationship, signing an MOU as a school and communicating with them on a regular basis as to our progress and ways we might continue to collaborate. I’m not going to go further into the work of the Lewis Institute now, but I will pause to say that I continue to be impressed by their hard work, dedication, and vision for using these skills to make the world a better place through social entrepreneurial ventures. They’re phenomenal people.

Anyway, by the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year we had plans for the members of the Lewis Institute to return to Lincoln early in the year. We had also taken many steps to embed entrepreneurial thinking into our curriculum and service-learning programs. Examples of the types of entrepreneurial initiatives we had initiated by that point included our teachers writing connections to entrepreneurial action in unit guides, taking our youngest students on field trips to visit local entrepreneurs who were adding economic and social value in their community, the creation of additional capstone projects in the middle school, the reworking of our service-learning initiatives so that students followed our version of the ETA (entrepreneurial thought and action) sequence, and the creation of multiple entrepreneurial electives in the high school, as well as plans for an entrepreneurial academy in the near future.

Someone (I’ve seen it credited to Peter Drucker but I’ve also read that’s debatable) said “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and a former supervisor of mine (Brian Pittman in Wake County Public Schools, a tremendous man who I still consider a great mentor and friend) used to say that “culture eats programs for breakfast.” Anyway, I’m a big believer in building culture, if you couldn’t already tell. So, at the start of 2019 I really wanted to make sure that we were not just writing strategy and creating programs but also building a culture of entrepreneurial thinking/doing/learning/teaching that would last. Enter our theme for the year, which started with an activity we playfully called: Claymation.

The directions for Claymation are simple, but we had some powerful learning as a result:

1. Start by asking all participants to think of something they LOVE about their community. That’s it. Don’t define the term community, and when someone asks (someone will) tell them that they can decide for themselves.
2. Give each participant an individual container of playdough. We were able to do this because we could reuse the playdough later with students, but you could easily do this as a drawing exercise using paper or even Ipads to go paperless.
3. Ask all participants to create a model of the thing they most LOVE about their community. I gave groups 5 minutes for this task. You want to give them enough time to try more than once if needed or even change their mind and try something else entirely.
4. After 5 minutes, ask participants to stop and share their creation with a partner. Ask them to share what they created and why they chose it.
5. Take time to have a few participants share with the whole group. Make sure to ask what they created and what it represents to them.

And that’s it. You can safely tell everyone they’ve engaged in entrepreneurial thinking. How? Well, I guarantee everyone followed these steps:

1. Identification: Everyone had to start by identifying their community of choice, and something they LOVED about their community. I let participants identify their community because it gives them ownership of the process and makes it relevant. If I told them the community to choose it might not mean as much (or really anything) to them personally. This allows for empathy. I also asked them to focus on what they LOVE about their community and took time to talk about how this focus on the positive drew them into the exercise. If I asked them to represent something they didn’t like or hated, how would that change their receptivity or effort?
2. Ideation: Everyone had to decide how to represent this thing they loved. I often saw people sculpt hands, flowers, and chains. I also saw amazingly intricate bird nests with a certain number of eggs each representing a different facet of their family, etc. Some made a circle and that was it. It doesn’t matter. This process of ideation is a foundational skill in entrepreneurial thinking.
3. Iteration: Ask for a show of hands as to how many people started and then restarted and then restarted again. Trial and error comes naturally in this exercise, and this is exactly what we want our students to learn to do in their academic lives. Our first attempt is almost never our best.
4. Reflection: In the end we asked participants to share with one another and the group. In that process of sharing, did they think about their thinking? If you gave them another 5 minutes would they continue to improve their model? Would they change anything based on what they saw and heard from others? This is them reflecting, and it’s maybe the most important part of the learning process. It’s also the step that is most often cut for time. What does that tell us about our practice moving forward.

So this is our 3IR process, and the Claymation activity we used to start our 2019 school year. We followed the activity with an observation cycle that saw our teachers attempt to implement some or all of the 3IR process in their classrooms during the first semester and receive positive feedback from an administrator or peer. The feedback we received from our staff after the Claymation activity and from the 3IR observations was overwhelmingly positive, and I really think it had a positive impact in our culture-building process. It set the stage for our continued implementation of entrepreneurial practices as a faculty and with our students that continues today.

*As we prepare to open our 2020 school year virtually, I had the pleasure of leading the Claymation activity with our new hires online last week (8/20) via Teams. To do so, I had participants draw their responses as eluded to above. It went well, and various participants were able to share their drawings and processes just as we did when live. I can safely report that Claymation lives on, in a new iteration, in the digital world.