You’ve heard the term “entrepreneur.” You’ve probably even heard the term “edupreneur.” But do you know what the term “teacherpreneur” means? As you can probably intuit, “teacherpreneurs” are teachers who create their own educational product or service to fix a problem they or their colleagues have encountered in the classroom. This is distinct from an edupreneur, which can be interpreted to mean any entrepreneur working in the education space – teacher or not.
There is no doubt that our educational system could benefit from this kind of internal entrepreneurialism – from that creativity, innovation, and lust for change. Ed tech companies, outside think tanks and nonprofits are an important force in creating and fostering these changes. But when innovation begins with educators who not only recognize the issues at hand, but who also have an immediate, textured, nuanced, and concrete firsthand experience with those issues in action, the solutions they develop have the potential to be extremely powerful, comprehensive, and long lasting.
Few know this better than, Charles Best, the former History teacher and founder of the popular classroom crowdfunding site, DonorsChoose.org. Best’s idea for this site came not out of any particular desire to start an organization, but simply because he and his colleagues were spending their own money on school supplies, and constantly felt frustrated at not being able to fund their more creative and exciting ideas for field trips and art supplies. As of the publication date of this article, 238,354 teachers had found funding for a total of 589,880 projects so far. As such, there is no doubt Best’s fellow educators were looking for similar solutions.
Says Best: “When you turn to people on the front lines and ask them to come up with projects for the exact people whom they’re serving, [they] will come up with better targeted, more innovative micro-solutions than those someone would come up with in the district office or in the ivory tower.”
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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