My Role as an Entrepreneurship Coach
KEY WORDS: Cohort-based learning, community-building, online-learning,
I was reading Tiago Forte's New Year's resolutions the other day. He is the founder of Forte's Labs, where he developed an online course called "Building The Second Brain." In it, he highlights the importance of cohort-based learning.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was challenged, like many other instructors throughout the world, to transition to online learning. The difference between cohort-based and self-paced learning (or any other online learning style) is that when you learn by yourself, you may not have access to a community or mentors who can answer questions.
Cohort-based learning may not be for everyone, but many individuals (including myself) learn better by bouncing ideas off of others. When addressing retention rates, the community aspect of learning is especially important and that is why MOOCs tend to do poorly in this regard. According to experts, low retention rates are due to a lack of accountability and peer-to-peer connection or mentorship.
Creating a cohort-based classroom in a virtual environment is a little more difficult. The transmission of information to individual students or teams was not always personalised in the beginning. However, my team and I were attempting to think creatively about how we could improve communication with our students. We were no longer going to be in front of a class. Instead, we were all sitting in front of a computer miles away from one another sharing information through a video.
My colleagues and I decided to incorporate some coaching sessions as well as a space for peer-to-peer questions. In other words, we flipped the classroom and conducted Q&A sessions. Furthermore, we had several coaching sessions with the groups in order to provide more targeted feedback. To conclude, at the midst of the pandemic, my teaching team and I did not have time to research best practices for online learning. However, looking back, I realise that we were, in fact, promoting cohort-based learning, which many believe is the future of learning.
Not long after reading Forte's work, I stumbled on a Tim Ferris interview with the author of Zen Habits, Leo Babauta. In it, Babauta describes his journey on how he overcame certain bad behaviours such as smoking and complacency. He attributes his success to developing self-compassion for himself and finding ways to translate big goals into small steps. In other words, he claims to have found simplicity in habit creation.
He then proceeds to share his family’s story. He has six children and they have all been educated in a method that is called 'unschooling'. The difference between unschooling and homeschooling is that the latter brings a school-like structure into the home. In unschooling there is a completely personalised approach to the child’s personality and ambitions. I found it fascinating that his children are able to design their own lesson plan. They are the ones who develop an idea and determine what is their next step in their learning journey - making it a natural process filled with curiosity.
It will be interesting to explore how we can combine the concepts of unschooling and cohort-based learning to encourage community-based initiatives that can assist entrepreneurs in determining their next steps. To take a highly personalised approach to their own business journey while also having a community where they can rely on one another, discuss ideas, and have coaching sessions that help keep them or make them feel more accountable. Entrepreneurship requires you to navigate uncertainty, which is why you must have the ability to recognise and map the next item you want to learn.
The final source of inspiration that wonderfully ties the concepts of cohort based learning and unschooling was the Netflix series, New Amsterdam. In the show, New Amsterdam is one of the first public hospitals in the United States, meaning that everyone (included those without health insurance and undocumented immigrants) could obtain medical attention.
The story revolves around the arrival of the new medical director called Dr. Max Goodwin. He is a highly innovative individual who truly cares about the patients. His strategy is to make the hospital more impactful is to revolutionise traditional leadership. His predecessors spent most of their time dealing with hospital's board and very little time understanding the day-to-day experience of the team. In contrast, Max focuses all of his time and energy in serving his team (the doctors in the frontline) so that they could better serve the patients. In other words, he turned the pyramid upside down by asking one simple question to his team: How can I help?
To conclude, my role as an entrepreneurship coach is to ask: how can I help you? Instead of constantly pushing information. This way entrepreneurs can decide what their next step is (unschooling) and have a cohort-based experience where they can bounce ideas off each other.
