The Teacher As Entrepreneur: Dwight Schrute

“Now that I own the building, I’m looking for new sources of revenue. And a daycare center? Muahahahahahahahaha…Well I guess it’s not an evil idea, it’s just a regular idea, but there’s no good laugh for a regular idea.”

— Dwight Schrute

The teacher as Dwight Schrute is a metaphor I have been thinking about for a while. I am a huge fan of The Office and Dwight is a funny, multi-faceted character. Once I interviewed Dave Burgess, a teacher who turned his passion into a thriving business, I knew it was time to develop this Dwight Schrute/enterpreneur metaphor to teaching. The following video is well worth the watch and highlights just some of Dwight’s enterprising spirit.

In the above video, there were many points that I felt directly paralleled teaching:

• don’t let failure hold you back

• outsourcing tasks (give them to our students with classroom jobs that empower them)

• solving problems

• creative use of existing materials

• the use of persuasion

• investing (time and/or money) to get great results

The last bullet brings me to the book The Distance Learning Playbook: Teaching for Engagement and Impact in Any Setting by John Hattie, Nancy Frey, and Douglas Fisher. This book talks about the Visible Learning Database and how it shows us which actions and influences impact learning for the better. Influences with effect sizes over 0.40 are above average and may accelerate learning. Those below 040 are not as likely to help students learn what they need to in a school year.

To continue the teacher as entrepreneur metaphor, when thinking least investment for the most return, we can use this data to plan learning experiences that will impact students’ progress in a major way. There are themes of Visible Learning that transcend the “delivery methods.”

1. INVESTMENT: “The first is that investment in learning means that there is a drive to foster each student’s increasing ability to recognize when they are learning, when they are not, and how to go about fixing it.”

2. RETURNS: “The second theme is that teachers know the impact of their instruction in terms of progress and achievement and take steps to refine their approaches.”

3. POSITIVE PROBLEM SOLVER “The third theme is that the mindframes of teachers, which is to say dispositions and beliefs, are in the driver’s seat.

- Excerpt from The Distance Learning Playbook, by Fisher, Frey, and Hattie (I added the words all in caps)

I went on the database and found so many strategies/influences that had high effect sizes. Here are just some:

• Interventions for students with learning needs: 0.77

• Classroom discussion: 0.82

• Flipped classroom: 0.58

• Reciprocal Teaching: 0.74

• Direct instruction: 0.59

• Problem-solving teaching: 0.67

• Appropriate challenging goals: 0.59

• Concept mapping: 0.64

• Strategy to integrate with prior knowledge: 0.93

• Teachers not labeling students: 0.61

“Distance learning is not an accelerator. It’s also not negative. That means that the setting isn’t the deciding factor.”

— The Distance Learning Playbook by Fisher, Frey, and Hattie

Teachers can learn from Dwight Schrute, Dave Burgess, and other entrepreneurs. Problem solving and researching what will yield the most learning is just one example of that.