


Education
Entrepreneurial Learning
Business
PROJECT
About the Inspire project |
The project is a joint initiative of a sport school, 2 universities, 2 public authorities responsible for education, and a private organization committed to promoting entrepreneurial learning and the link between education and business. The 6 partners represent 4 European countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus.
TARGET GROUPS
Even though the project results may be useful for the wider youth work sector and other educational sectors, the project primarily addresses the needs of the following target groups:
-secondary school students
-secondary school educators in the sport-related disciplines and teachers in schools with sport profile
-regional/local educational authorities
CONTEXT
Across Europe, there is a broad consensus that entrepreneurial education has a positive impact on the competences, problem-solving skills and employability of students. As a result, entrepreneurial learning is being increasingly integrated into a variety of disciplines, such as engineering and the arts. However, even though sport is taught at all levels of education, it has generally been excluded from these developments. This project is built on the rationale that sport has cultural, social and educational functions that provide plenty of opportunities for innovations and even business. If provided with supporting resources, schools and educators can utilize the enthusiastic student engagement with sport to teach students to identify opportunities, lead others, and develop sport ventures or sport organizations. The combination of sport and entrepreneurship learning in extracurricular activities can thus build students’ transversal entrepreneurial skills and create motivation, passion and awareness to get engaged in business or social activities in the field of sport.
OBJECTIVES
The project’s overall objective is to contribute to integrating sport into entrepreneurial learning in secondary schools.
The specific objectives are to:
-Develop a training program on sport management, coaching and physical education that could build students’ technical and transversal competences for sport-based entrepreneurship and leadership;
-Develop challenge-based learning tools and WebQuests related to sports-based entrepreneurship to enable a more effective and engaging learning process;
-Develop methodological guidance for teachers on designing and delivering sport-based entrepreneurial learning.
EXPECTED IMPACTS
At local level the project targets schools and educators, as well as students themselves. It will raise awareness that school sport activities can be utilized to build knowledge and skills.It will also provide guidance and resources for schools to experiment with the integration of sport into entrepreneurial learning and will train the first cohort of students and educators.
The desired long-term impacts are to improve entrepreneurial learning in secondary schools, to facilitate stronger involvement of low-performing students in entrepreneurial learning, to contribute to enhancing graduates’ employability, and to provide new professional development opportunities for physical education teachers.
At regional and national level, the project will target regional public bodies responsible for education. The desired short to medium term impact is to improve the strategies for supporting entrepreneurial learning and practical entrepreneurial opportunities through utilizing the multitude of sport activities currently being organized in schools, as well as to promote the use of challenge-based and experiential learning in physical education. The desired long-term impact is to support secondary schools in exploiting the educational impact of physical education and in utilizing sport’s contribution to skills building.
MAIN ACTIVITIES AND RESULTS

3 Workshops for students

4 Dissemination conferences

3 Practical sports-based entrepreneurial activities with student participation

5 Trainings of trainers

The partnership will produce the following intellectual outputs:
1. Methodological guidelines for educators.
2. Challenges and WebQuests Toolkit on Sports-Based Entrepreneurship.
3.Extracurricular integrated training program on Sport-Based Entrepreneurship and Coaching.
PROJECT RESULTS
IO1Extracurricular integrated training program on Sports-Based Entrepreneurship and Coaching
RELEVANCE & INNOVATION
Sport is taught in every school and at all educational levels. Naturally, most of the teaching focuses on the fitness or physical activity components. However, this curricular focus does not allow students to grasp the social and business aspects of sport and to contemplate future employment in this area. Some aspects of sport management are taught in schools with a sports profile but the coverage is not enough to prepare students for successful entrepreneurial endeavours in the field, especially in view of the limited possibility for students to engage in practical sport management activities. Thus, high school students, whether in sport-profiled schools and in other schools, rarely receive combined training that allows them to build a comprehensive skillset including both entrepreneurial competences and the technical skills needed to lead and train sportsmen or to design and deliver effective sport or recreation activities. A comprehensive skillset would require the combination of entrepreneurial training and training in sport pedagogy. It would significantly increase the employability of sports graduates, both upon graduation and later in life, when many of them will retire from active sport. It would also provide non-sports graduates with the passion and awareness to get engaged in entrepreneurial or social activities in the field of sport. We believe extracurricular school activities should be exploited to enhance sport education in the directions described above.
OBJECTIVES, EXPECTED IMPACT
INSPIRE partners will develop an Extracurricular Training Program on Sports-Based Entrepreneurship and Coaching, which has the following objectives:
– To provide learning resources that allow secondary school students to develop a critical and practical understanding of the links between sport management and development, coaching and physical education
– To provide teaching resources for teachers willing to experiment with innovative cross-curricular training combining sports and entrepreneurship.
The output will be suitable for individual learning but can also be used by teachers to design and deliver their own extracurricular activity.
The expected impact is to enable the delivery of a combined training in entrepreneurship and sport pedagogy that we believe is the basis of sports-based entrepreneurship. In the long run, this can enhance graduates’ employability. Depending on the autonomy of schools and teachers to introduce innovations in curricular entrepreneurial or physical education, the output can also be used to enhance curricular teaching. In any case, the program can provide students with additional knowledge that would enhance their performance in entrepreneurship and management subjects included in the curriculum. The last part of the output is directly applicable to improving physical education teaching and will enhance teachers’ pedagogical skills, which in turn would improve students’ coaching and sport pedagogy skills.
CONTENT
A: Sport event management
– Organizational principles in sport events
– Financial management of sport events
– Planning and managing professional collaborations and volunteers
– Managing fundraising, sponsorship and resource allocation in sport events
– Evaluating and assessing the impact of sport events
B. Managing amateur sport clubs
– Understanding sports policy and administration
– Managing people in amateur sport clubs
– Project management
– Financial management of amateur sport clubs
– Identifying opportunities for innovation in sport
C. Working with sport club members and athletes – coaching, physical education and performance analysis
– Understanding the relationship between sport, physical activity and health
– Managing physical training and understanding coaching pedagogy
– Understanding performance analysis.
FORMAT
The training program will be suited to the needs of upper secondary high school students and should provide introductory knowledge at an accessible level.
TRANSFERABILITY
The output is intended for extracurricular teaching and learning, and its transferability does not depend on curricular limitations. Regarding its possible impact on curricular activities, it can be used to complement and enhance entrepreneurship subjects in countries where this is applicable. Within the INSPIRE consortium, in Bulgaria and Greece, entrepreneurship in upper secondary education is taught as a separate subject or as part of the social sciences curricula. In Turkey, it is an optional separate subject. A combination is these approaches is valid for all EU countries, so the relevance and transferability of the resource appear very good. In Cyprus, entrepreneurship is not yet recognized as part of the curricula, but INSPIRE could provide a good practice. The output will be available in 4 EU languages.
PROJECT RESULTS
IO2 Challenges and WebQuests Toolkit on Sports-Based Entrepreneurship
RELEVANCE & INNOVATION
Entrepreneurial learning benefits from the use of age-appropriate challenges in the learning process. Challenges promote personal engagement and growth on the learner’s part. They can encompass diverse types of tasks and hands-on activities, used as the basis of project-based learning sessions and aimed at introducing learners to a topic or a problem and allowing them to develop entrepreneurial awareness.
A WebQuest is a specific form of challenge that requires the learner to become engaged in implementing the quest task by discovering, researching, analyzing and building his/her own understanding of the issue while using information available on the web. In the spirit of entrepreneurship, students are not provided with the answers and solutions; instead, they are asked to come up with them on their own.
Both types of learning tools tend to be associated with fun and positive experiences, which, coupled with the higher level of engagement, makes learning more effective and long lasting.
Learning is experienced as an active, constructive process rather than as a passive and reproductive one. The tools are based on a methodology which puts the learner at the centre of the learning process, while the teacher becomes more of a facilitator.
In this project, we will develop challenges and WebQuests related to sports-based entrepreneurship. We believe these are relevant and innovative tools not just because of the methodology, but also because they relate to sport. Many students perceive sport as their strength and/or passion, and almost all of them perceive it as “fun”. Therefore, their level of engagement in an entrepreneurial learning process that relates to sport is likely to be higher than in conventional areas. In addition, sport itself can help develop or strengthen personal qualities that are vital for leadership skills and for entrepreneurial success, such as self-drive, perseverance, goal-orientated behavior, confidence, ability to handle stress and failure, mobilizing others and being part of a team.
The output will be based on the 15 entrepreneurial competences included in the EntreComp Entrepreneurship Competence Framework promoted by the EC in 2016, and will primarily target the foundation and intermediate levels of proficiency of these competences.
OBJECTIVE
The output will consist of 5 challenges and 5 WebQuests that will provide educators with ready-to-use-or-remix interactive teaching/learning tools covering the sports-based entrepreneurship concepts included in IO1 in a way suitable for the young generation and empowering teachers to innovate in the delivery of entrepreneurial education.
IMPACT
If taken up by teachers, the challenges and WebQuests are likely to strengthen the impact of IO1 by ensuring higher engagement of the learners with the subject matter. They can strengthen students’ entrepreneurial skills and can create awareness and passion for sports-based entrepreneurship. In addition, challenges and WebQuests develop students’ transversal skills such as creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving abilities and digital competences. The tools can widen and diversify the learning experience and help teachers achieve student engagement and effective learning sessions.
INDICATIVE CONTENT
1.Introduction to the challenge/WebQuest, the “big idea” guiding it and key questions/issues that students should address
2.Clarification of the project to be implemented or task to be solved
3.Guidelines and resources
–For challenges: guidelines for learners (guiding questions and activities they may wish to engage in)
–For WebQuests: resources that can be used (websites, platforms, networks, videos, e-books)
4.Student worksheets and templates for presenting the solution and results.
The challenges/WebQuests will be designed to inspire learners to engage creatively with key entrepreneurial concepts by pursuing a project (e.g. planning a training session in a sports club, planning a sports event with a social purpose, finding a solution to conflicts within a sports club, etc.).
They will motivate learners to seek connections between different entrepreneurial concepts in order to weave them together in the challenge/WebQuest solution. They will also sensitize students to the real-world relevance of entrepreneurial concepts and competences.
TRANSFERABILITY
The challenges/WebQuests will be designed to be easily adaptable for use in any sport management or entrepreneurship training. They will be transferrable to other learning environments (e.g. non-formal education) and moderately transferable to contexts where disadvantaged learners are targeted.
IO3 will provide methodological guidelines for these two types of transfer. Due to the universal
significance of sports-based entrepreneurship, the topic
itself is relevant in many countries. IO2 will be available in 4 languages. The WebQuests/challenges will be available on the
website in an interactive form.
PROJECT RESULTS
PROJECT RESULTS
IO3 Methodological guidelines for educators
“Experimenting with Cross-Curricular Entrepreneurial Education and Challenge-Based
Learning in the Field of Sport”
RELEVANCE & INNOVATION
Despite the advantages of the cross-curricular approach to entrepreneurial education (with or without the additional tools offered by challenge-based learning), this is not a conventional form of teaching and learning, which is why many teachers and students may be hesitant to take it up. It requires longer time commitment and destroys the traditional lines of control within the classroom. It requires the teacher to take the role of facilitator and collaborator rather than someone who provides knowledge. It may even put the teacher in situations when students’ projects enter a subject domain in which the teacher does not have enough knowledge. Finally, conventional assessment methods are likely to be insufficient and/or inappropriate. For these reasons, teachers need guidance in implementing such innovations.
OBJECTIVE
The Methodological Guidelines aim at facilitating the application of IO1 and IO2 in the classroom and at encouraging further innovation in the design and delivery of entrepreneurial learning at secondary school level.
INDICATIVE CONTENT
A. Introduction to the methodology and benefits of cross-curricular entrepreneurial education and challenge-based learning
B. Planning and preparation for taking up IO1 and IO2 in extracurricular activities in secondary schools or in different learning contexts:
-resources and materials needed
-time-frame and duration
-technology-related or equipment-related issues
-organizational issues, logistics.
-necessary background knowledge and preparation
-understanding possible difficulties that the students may face and the evolving roles of the teacher
-combining cross-curricular and challenge-based entrepreneurial learning with other interactive learning tools, e.g. role-play games -exploiting synergies or integrating cross-curricular and challenge-based entrepreneurial learning into curricular learning
-guidelines for organizing cross-curricular and challenge-based entrepreneurial training for disadvantaged learners.
This section will serve to provide transferability guidelines. It will discuss possible or necessary changes in the ways IO1 and IO2 are used in case the learning environment or the target group changes (e.g. if the IOs need to be used for teacher training or for training in non-formal education contexts, such as NGOs, sport clubs, youth work, etc.)
C. Guidelines for designing and using different assessment mixes for learner performance assessment and evaluation; guidelines for mapping curricular knowledge and skills to learner achievements in extracurricular training.
D. Guidelines for educators on developing their own challenge-based learning tools (challenges or WebQuests)
-how to introduce the problem or the big idea
-types of tasks relevant to entrepreneurial learning around which challenges and WebQuests could be built (e.g. design, consensus building, analytical tasks, self-knowledge, persuasion, judgement, scientific inquiry, creative tasks, etc.)
-utilizing and maximizing the impact of different learning processes (listening, reading, learning by doing, interaction and communication, observing, etc.)
-how to choose effective and reliable resources (e.g. web-based sources)
-how to help learners find their own solutions and answers
-how to define learning outcomes and map them to curricular learning outcomes if relevant
-how to create assessment tools for measuring learner progress and performance
EXPECTED IMPACT
IO3 will:
-guide educators in particular on using IO1 and IO2 in the classroom and integrating them in their entrepreneurial education or sports education initiatives in various contexts, thus improving the exploitability and transferability of the developed IOs
-inspire and equip educators with the knowledge and skills to design, deliver and evaluate innovative cross-curricular entrepreneurial education, including by utilizing challenge-based learning
-motivate and empower educators to develop on their own custom challenge-based learning tools in order to respond to the particular learning needs of their students
TRANSFERABILITY
A large part of IO3 provides transferability guidelines for IO1 and IO2 which would make them suitable to be used in different educational sectors, notably in youth work and non-formal education, as well as in learning activities targeted at disadvantaged learners. However, the output will provide also more generic guidance about the introduction of cross-curricular approaches and challenge-based learning in education that could be applicable to other interdisciplinary subject areas (e.g. the combination of STEM with Arts –STEAM, and the combination of STEAM with Entrepreneurship – ESTEAM), and even traditional curricular disciplines, where challenge-based learning is gaining popularity. The output will be made available in 4 European language
PROJECT NEWS
We are going to share news about the forthcoming activities and events within the project. Stay tuned
PROJECT TEAM
The INSPIRE project is a joint initiative of a sports school, two universities, 2 public authorities responsible for education, and a private organization committed to promoting entrepreneuriallearning and the link between education and business. The 6 partners represent 4 European countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus.The partners have merged their collective experience in the field of school education and at the same time, they share the same necessities and a common goal.
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PARTNERS
57 SPORTS SCHOOL „SAINT NAUM OHRIDSKI“
EUROPEAN CENTER FOR QUALITY OOD
DIRECTORATE OF SECONDARY EDUCATION, CHANIA
MUGLA IL MILLI EGITIM MUDURLUGU
TEKIRDAG NAMIK KEMAL UNIVERSITESI