As a career and life planning teacher, EVERFI’s Venture course has helped my students expand their career readiness skills through project-based learning entrepreneurship activities.
We started with EVERFI’s free online resources through the Venture online learning curriculum. The course offers built-in pre-and post-surveys as well as individual assessments to track student understanding of the material being taught. Through the lessons my students learned key vocabulary relating to entrepreneurship, starting up a business, and marketing their ideas to target audiences. I utilized these modules as the basis for our Career and Life Planning project-based learning activity.
The EVERFI: Venture program provides teachers with the opportunity to incorporate project-based learning via entrepreneurship lessons in their career readiness programs. My students took what they learned from the lesson “Recognizing Business Opportunities and Planning to Start Your Business” to design tee shirts for our junior high school. Students were placed into three “client” groups – Parents/Community, Students and School Staff. Next, they used the activity’s “Create a Consumer Profile” to look at what design would best suit their client group. Then, they worked collaboratively to design their client group’s shirt. Each group then presented their design for their classmates to critique.
They were asked to either give specific feedback on certain aspects of the design or just an overall comment on the design. The groups then took their constructive feedback and made any adjustments they felt were necessary before finalizing their design.
Creating Business Pitches & Other Entrepreneurship Activity Ideas
In the next step of our project-based learning activity, we involved all stakeholders by creating a “Business Pitch” utilizing the model learned from EVERFI’s lesson 4 “The Entrepreneur In You.” In this lesson, students create a business pitch for a food truck they have individually created through the EVERFI online learning platform. I have my students practice their public speaking standards by presenting this pitch to the class. Building on that model, in their groups they wrote, recorded, and shared their designs with their stakeholders to be voted on as to which design was the favorite (“winning” shirt designs are shown below). We then reached out to a shirt printing company that took the group’s designs and has made an official shirt for each client group. We are offering the shirts for sale to our students, staff, and community members.
Throughout the entire project, the students have looked forward to having their shirts chosen to be printed and EVERFI’s free entrepreneurship resources made that possible. The program created an engaging project-based learning experience that students were able to make real-life connections.
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My name is Amanda Voth and I teach junior high school technology and business in Baldwin City, Kansas. I teach Career and Life Planning to eighth grade students. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Elementary Education from Kansas State University, a Master’s Degree in Instructional Design and Technology from Emporia State University and a secondary Business education endorsement.