Last month I closed out a three-year tenure as Director of Capstone for the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of EducationEducation Entrepreneurship M.S.Ed. program. I’ve taught in EdEnt, as we fondly call it, for five years and will continue to teach next year, but I’m saying goodbye, with great gratitude, to the administrative work of being the director.
In June I wrote about workingpacking around the world to explore the next phase of my career journey. My quest was to try any project that piqued my curiosity and then pay attention to what sparked joy as I was putting in the work.
For the administrative work at Penn (separate from the teaching work), what sparked joy was designing a coherent, reflective, iterative, self-reinforcing system that grew students’ competence in becoming entrepreneurs (or intrapreneurs) in any endeavor related to learning or education.
As W. Edwards Deming famously said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it does.” How fun it is to design different systems to get different results!
But systems are complicated. They have many moving parts, each of which often has many moving parts. A graduate-level program for adult learners can be thought of as a system (itself part of a much larger education system). A capstone, whether in higher ed or K12, is often added to a program or major in order to create real world application, relevance, and skill building for students.
Capstones exist on a spectrum. They can be simple – write a research paper or do an internship. Or they can be hefty.
The Design Problem
Capstone at EdEnt carries a big burden within the system that is the program.
Capstone bears the weight of creating coherence for an intense 10-course, year-long program that has three distinct strands: business courses, education courses, and entrepreneurial leadership courses.
Without Capstone, students would experience each of these courses as discrete learning experiences. Finding connections across them would largely be the work of the students, as it is in most of formal education, whether higher ed or K12.
EdEnt students come from around the world – 15 time zones the last time we went virtual. They range in age from 23 to 63. They have incredibly diverse personal and professional backgrounds. They’re interested in problems that impact every age group from early childhood to senior citizens, from personal lives to professional lives. In the five years I’ve taught, no two cohorts have been alike.
We have to accommodate this diversity with a limited number of faculty and a limited number of instructional hours – while building a coherent experience.
This coherence is why, since Bobbi Kurshan and Jenny Zapf launched it a decade ago, EdEnt has always had a Capstone course. Capstones need to be like modeling clay, stretchy yet smooth and consistent.
The Design Solution
Capstone’s job is to help students make sense of all these discrete learning experiences by bringing them together in the journey of designing and launching an entrepreneurial venture. The venture can be anything they dream of: 100% student choice.
Over the years the Capstone team had experimented with a variety of approaches to making this complexity work.
The approach we took when I became director was to look at the course in terms of competencies. If the outcome we were aiming for was developing entrepreneurial competence, what did entrepreneurial competence look like and what did we need to do over the course of the year to grow that competence in our students?
We identified key entrepreneurial competencies, based on research and practice.
Competencies
What are competencies?
Competencies can be thought of as the knowledge, skills, and mindsets that enable you to do something.
The core courses would teach our students the knowledge and some of the skills and mindsets.
Capstone’s job then became to create a pathway or journey that would allow students multiple opportunities to apply that knowledge and those skills to the real world, thereby enabling them to shift and grow their mindsets, and develop competence as entrepreneurs.
Pathways work best when they are based on a process. The process we developed was a Venture Journey that included four component processes, each of which required application of knowledge, development of skills, and shifting of mindsets.
Competence grows when the learning pathways and processes are visible to learners – so that they understand why they’re learning what they’re learning, so they have the skills and concepts to make sense of and even direct their own personal growth journey.
Giving students repeated opportunities to make sense of their growing competence – via storytelling – is also fundamental.
To accomplish this we built out a learning map that lets students see the puzzle picture at the top of the box – how their courses and the knowledge, skills, and mindsets they learn and apply through them, come together to grow their entrepreneurial competence.
The map itself is too detailed and specific to share here, but in conjunction with the pathway overview graphic above, it gives students (and faculty) a tool to navigate a complex year.
The point is intentional navigation. The learning designers (i.e. the faculty) need to put this map together so that students can spend their time finding their personal path forward, rather than building the map itself.
Faculty as Learning Designers
Universities often operate in ways where each professor is the master of their own learning design: they create courses with syllabi and effect knowledge transfers from their brains and the corpus of knowledge to their students. Then the students have to figure out what it all means.
To build a coherent program – a system – we needed to bring our faculty together so we could reflect on what was working to grow student competence and what wasn’t. We needed to redesign as needed.
So in Capstone, we grew a culture of faculty collaboration, reflection, iteration, and problem-solving, rather than everyone operating in their own fiefdom.
A Flexible System
A good system is designed to do its job effectively, efficiently, and engagingly. It needs to be coherent but not standardized, flexible but not chaotic, and adaptive to change. It needs to be as simple as possible to do the work it's designed to do.
A stressor, like Covid, helps designers really analyze the moving parts and move towards ever more simplicity, personalizability, and flexibility.
It gave me so much joy to lead the design of all this.
And, once it was largely working, I came to understand that I love the complex messiness of the beginning, and not so much the refinement of something already well ordered.
It was time to say goodbye, with great gratitude...
Next Steps
And launch a company, Incubate Learning, that supports individuals and teams in K12 and higher ed to design such systems.
