Nicole Dyson On Innovative & Impact-Led Entrepreneurship Education That Engages Students

Nicole Dyson is a globally recognised expert and practitioner in project-based learning and student entrepreneurship. As a teacher in the USA, UK and Australia as well as a Head of Department and Head of Year at some of Queensland’s top-performing public schools, Nicole has repeatedly led the design and implementation of whole-school changes to support future ready learning; placing young people at the forefront of co-designing contextually relevant learning experiences.

She is the founder of Future Anything, an award-winning, curriculum-aligned entrepreneurship program for high school students and the founder of YouthX, Australia's only start-up accelerator program for school-aged entrepreneurs.

She has also recently launched Catapult Cards; a fun design thinking tool that unlocks creativity, catalyses collaboration, and launches innovative, scalable, and sustainable ideas that fly. Nicole is a contributor to the Foundation for Young Australian’s YLab program, has represented Australia as a delegate for the G20 Young Entrepreneur’s Alliance, held in Argentina in 2018 and was a finalist in the 2019 Business News Australia 'Young Entrepreneur Awards'.

Nicole is an engaging and skilled facilitator, panelist and speaker who is a passionate advocate for equity, the future of education, and empowering young people to bend the future; one youth-led idea at a time.

Nicole discusses the future of education and opportunities for both students and educators to create impact-led enterprises.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - Tell us a bit about your background and what led you to your passion in education and entrepreneurship?

[Nicole Dyson] - I wish that I could say from day dot I was always going to be a teacher or that I had some fundamental experience in school that led me to always see myself in that role. But for me, that just wasn't the case. I was a swimmer as a young person and really involved in sport. I was also a scholarship kid at a private school and as the eldest of five kids I felt a lot of pressure to go university when I finished school. But if I reflect back, I don't know that I was entirely sure what I was going to study when I left.

Like many young people when they're in school, I genuinely had no idea what I wanted to be when I grow up, but I knew that I needed to look at university as an option.

I jumped out of school and started a Bachelor of Science hoping to have a broad experience that might shape the next steps for me, but I hated it. Then I switched degrees and jumped into a Bachelor of Applied Science which for the record is not that different to a Bachelor of Science! I hated that too, so I kind of did what every young person does when they're a little bit lost and confused, I packed a bag and went overseas. It was my experience overseas working as a swimming coach for the London Masters Team in the UK and then also directing swimming programs at summer camps in the States that made me believe that teaching might be the role for me. I was working with young people in America and I realised that I got so much joy out of seeing young people do something that they didn't think they could do before.

I came back to Australia, studied teaching and then found myself in my first teaching job at Caboolture. [I was] working in a really complex school with young people who were multi-generationally dependent on welfare, and quite disenfranchised from education as a system that might support them.

All of these montages around what teaching was supposed to look like in the classroom crumbled before me. It was really hard; I would come home and cry every day. My partner at the time would be booting me out the door at 8:15am saying, "it's a 30-minute drive, school starts at 8:45am, you need to leave now."

I found that everything I thought I was going to do in the classroom just wasn't possible when young people didn't want to be there.

I found myself questioning constantly what was the purpose of this classroom experience, and how can I create a space where the young people that are in front of me can buy into that purpose and see that this could be a place for them that will help them grow, achieve, support them and also be a safe space for them to be themselves as well? In that experience I found myself sitting in Head of Year and roles where I was responsible for pastoral care programs, a lot of the time with at-risk young people who were clinging to the fringes of education.

In that experience, I started questioning, "why are we spending so much time writing re-engagement programs for young people," when maybe if we got the classroom experience right for them, I wouldn't have to try and tap them in through extracurricular programs.

They were actually being brought into learning in the classroom, and that was the first problem I guess I noticed. There were young people sitting in front of me who didn't think that this learning offered them anything and so the problem I wanted to solve was how can I create a really tangible, explicit link between learning in the classroom and life outside the school gates? I started playing with curriculum and using the national curriculum that we have, but I guess [I was] changing the modality that students would experience. In the first unit I did that with, we were looking at Indigenous representation in texts. This is a pretty common year nine English unit, and the task for the students was to do a monologue at the end. Instead of doing that monologue, we actually used these Indigenous representations in texts as a stimulus to explore marginalised groups in society.

Then from there, we tasked the students with choosing a marginalised group that they felt a connection to, and then devising their own social enterprise that closed the gap or a gap that existed for that marginalised group.

It ticked all the curriculum boxes that it needed to, but [also created a higher] level of engagement amongst the young people by not only learning about the problem, but actually having the space and support to do something about it. I saw these kids flourish in that experience and from there it's grown. We started with a hundred students in one school five years ago and now we're working with four and a half thousand students in 50 schools around the country. Across the course of a term, young people look at problems that matter to them and then by the end of that 10 weeks, they're pitching their own innovative, scalable, and sustainable business solutions that make the world a better place.

That's fantastic, and you're doing that as founder and CEO of Future Anything. I understand a bit more about your purpose now, so tell us a more about these projects that you're involved in.

I think for me, I'm an educator first and an entrepreneur second, so I wanted to create a program that would add value to the education system and also be an equitable opportunity that all students can tap into.

I think the challenge for some programs and extra-curricular workshops are bolted on, and only the fortunate few get access to that opportunity. The masses don't get the opportunity to tap into those experiences, especially when we embed them in programs or subjects like business or entrepreneurship, where you've already got a group of young people who think they're interested in this. What that doesn't do is provide an opportunity for a whole host of other young people to try and test to see whether they might be interested in it. Primarily in our Future Anything scope, we run those in-curriculum programs and it's in three parts. The first part is the capacity building of the educators, because if you don't have competent teachers, you won't have engaging curriculum.

That's just the cornerstone of building that culture within a school of innovation, having that staff member or the team of staff really confident in that space, so we do a lot of coaching with teachers. We then build fully resourced curriculum units for those staff to roll out in their classrooms, but we're not plug and play.

We stand next to those teachers and work with them to contextualise that curriculum for their learners. Then, the third part of the program is I found when I was a classroom teacher and I'd build these amazing units of work that I might have these kids that are super excited about their ideas at the end of the program. But what do they do with it at the end? The problem we would encounter is that as a classroom educator I'm then moving on to the next unit of work, so I don't necessarily have the time or the bandwidth to devote to supporting those students to take their ideas beyond that classroom experience.

The third part of our Future Anything program is post-program opportunities for young people to access the funding and support to actually launch their ideas out of the classroom and into the real world.

We do this through a national competition at the end of the program and we've also built YouthX, which is an accelerator program beyond that competition for really eager students to access 12 months of mentorship and support to scale that idea after they've launched. Again, I think going back to the original question about what led me to that passion in education entrepreneurship, in some ways it has just been stumbling into a problem and then devising a solution that solves it. The first problem was that learning didn't link to life, so we created a curriculum that did. The second problem was that we had these excited young people that had nowhere to go with their ideas, so we solved that problem by developing YouthX. Then Catapult Cards, our most recent venture has come about by working with teachers in the classroom and seeing educators struggle to get young people to ideate solutions.

Our current education system is set up in the sense that young people sit in the classroom, the teacher asks a question and there's normally one right answer to that question. We don't train young people to flex that creativity as a muscle.

Catapult Cards was designed to solve two problems. One, it's a series of prompts that enables the cultural conditions for creativity in the classroom, but secondly, we've built it as a social enterprise where 50% of the profits from the kids go back to creating a bucket of cash for young people to access and fund their ideas.

[We did this] because we were having all these young people come through from a diverse range of backgrounds who had killer ideas, but just couldn't access that small bit of funding they needed to have a crack at it. Catapult Cards will actually fund those young people getting access to maybe a particular product, service or mentoring that they need to actually see that idea into fruition.

There's some great initiatives there Nicole, and obviously a lot of learnings as you've worked through and developed solutions to those problems.

What advice then would you be giving to the teachers, principals or educators who are interested in implementing design thinking or social entrepreneurship education in their school to help students take their idea and turn it into reality?

I think the first cornerstone piece of advice that I would give is create the time and space for your teaching teams to access support to do that. I think we often expect a lot of our educators.

The future of work is evolving at a rate that we've never seen before and we have an expectation that our educators in the classroom are able to evolve at that pace without access to the professional learning and capacity building in order to remodel what education looks like in the classroom to meet the needs outside of the classroom.

There's a multitude of providers out there whose core business is to build the capacity of educators to think innovatively about curriculum and entrepreneurship. Also, within the start-up ecosystem, there are a plethora of providers in that space who are just jumping at the bit to get into schools and show them the potential of entrepreneurship as a potential career choice.

Firstly, take the time and space to put some funding into building the capacity of your teaching team, and then secondly look to your local ecosystem and see who's available, keen and eager to come in and work with your students and work with your staff to do that.

Great advice there Nicole. Are there any fundamental ingredients that you believe are required to create this collaborative and innovative learning environment in schools? You're talking about providing that space and time for teachers to really figure things out and get support, but what are those ingredients that are really needed beyond that?

It's such a great question. I think we often talk about the need for young people to be gritty and resilient.

Entrepreneurship as a vehicle provides this incredible lens for young people to flex that muscle and learn to be gritty and resilient. But perhaps the one part that we don't necessarily set students up for, particularly throughout the traditional education system is actually building that failure fitness.

In many classrooms, a young person sits as an empty vessel in the classroom and absorb the information that they need to, and then they're marked on their ability to regurgitate that information in the right order back to the educator. That piece of work is marked and then it's not spoken of again. Traditional assessment isn't iterative necessarily, although there might be a draft that's submitted for feedback, there isn't that ability for students to fail in a safe space and then learn to take feedback on and iterate from that.

Youth entrepreneurship Brisbane_Nicole-Dyson

I would say that one of the cornerstone cultural conditions to set up in any school to create that space for innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity is how we explicitly build the failure fitness of our young people.

How are we creating really tangible opportunities for young people to get up, try something and then if it sucks [which usually the first time it does] support those young people to seek feedback, process the feedback, iterate on the task and then present it again? I'm not sure that that's necessarily something that any person finds easy, to seek feedback, take feedback on and then iterate. It always takes a hit to the ego, but how are we building that capacity not only for our teachers, but also for our students in the way that we do teaching and learning?

You have been in education for a while Nicole, and you've seen the secondary education system transform. I'm keen to hear how you see education shifting into the future, what are the positive things that are happening and where is there room for opportunity and space to really improve?

I definitely think the appetite for new is greater now than it has ever been in education, and I certainly think the wealth of research that's been released talking about the skills and capabilities we need to be building with our young people in order to match what the job market is chasing is pushing the system in the direction that it needs to go in. As much as there's a lot of negative things that have come out of COVID-19 in the last 12 months, there are some steep accelerations we've seen for change particularly in education as a result.

A lot of people that might've been early adopters to hybrid learning or different technology have been forced under remote learning to adapt and adopt new ways of teaching and learning, which I think has actually seen an improvement in the way that we've been able to approach learning innovatively.

I definitely think in the space of technology and adapting purposeful technology we're moving in the right direction. I've also seen a number of schools off the back of some of their young people performing better in remote learning question what their model of education looks like. Do we have to have a nine to three school day? Do we have to have students face to face for every class, all day, every day? Can young people opt-in to a hybrid model of their high school education where they're in-person for some of their classes, but they're actually perhaps learning virtually for others? Can clusters of schools work together to create subject offerings so that young people are collaborating across schools to access subjects that wouldn’t be able to be run in a single school due to not enough students being offered?

Those are some of the cool things that I'm definitely starting to see in education, and I think that the challenge for the education system is that it's such a slow-moving beast. Often, the core decision making is made at the top without necessarily consultation through the middle.

I think that's always going to be the challenge in trying to move such a huge beast like the education system, but we're seeing clusters of schools do some really innovative work using technology and also completely re-imagining curriculum with the adoption of project-based learning and inquiry-based learning as a vehicle to really bring the real world into the classroom.

social entrepreneurship programs for youth australia

Some fantastic insights there, and leading on from that let’s focus the conversation quickly on the students themselves. Let's say we have an impact-led and purposeful student. They have an idea and they're at the early stages of starting their enterprise. Where have you seen them typically go wrong and what advice would you give to those students?

There's probably three key places that I see young people and old people go wrong when they're starting an idea. I think it's often the same failure points irrespective of the age of the entrepreneur when starting. The first one that I would say is the entrepreneur picks the wrong problem to tackle. Here at Future Anything, the foundation of our program is our entrepreneur’s odyssey, which is a series of 10 steps that step students through the process of firstly looking at who they are all the way through to pitching an innovative solution.

The first two steps of our odyssey are basically looking at where have you come from and what you care about because the best ideas are where entrepreneurs are able to catalyse their lived experiences with their passions.

I think the first failure point I see is where young people and entrepreneurs in general take problems that they don't have any authentic experience around, and we've got that notion of the hero-preneur. They're often a white saviour walking into a developing country in order to fix a problem that they've observed from afar, and I think we have to bring people back to looking at, "what's your lived experience?"

[This is] the lived experience of people close to you and your passions, interests, and strengths. Then [it's about] how do we design innovative solutions from a deeply authentic place about problems that we know about? That would probably be the first failure point.

The second failure point would probably be not taking enough time to look at who else also cares about that problem, and that's for two reasons. One is who else is playing in the space that you might be able to partner with or learn from, and secondly, if you don't understand the landscape, if you don't do a horizon scan of what solutions already exist in the space that you're trying to affect change, how can you ever truly know if your solution is needed in the space? I think taking the time to really dig into what's working and what's not and why is a crucial step before you actually prototype anything. The third thing that I would say is people just launching something quick and dirty. The entrepreneur space talks about MVP's all the time, but what could you do for a hundred dollars or less to test your idea and see whether it's worth something?

Don't invest $10,000 or six months of development in a concept without pinning down that you're working on the right problem, you've done a horizon scan and you've ascertained that the idea in your head has a valid space in that playing field. The third thing would be how quickly and cheaply can you test the concepts to see whether the market can validate it?

I absolutely agree 100% there, and I have seen people tackle entrepreneurship in a way that could certainly be a lot more lean and agile before spending a couple of years putting time and effort into an idea to discover that nobody really wants it.

Tell us about a couple of inspiring projects or initiatives that you've come across recently, and finally, what books would you recommend to our listeners?

Well, we have the pleasure of working with crazy groups of young people through our programs that do some pretty interesting things. One of my favourites is our second-place winner from last year's grand final Mikayla who started the I Am Project, and I love it because it's so simple. It's basically just keyrings that say positive affirmations on them, such as "I'm enough", "I'm worthy" and "I'm kind", because she noticed and felt from her own mental health journey that we are so saturated in negativity that sometimes we don’t have that reminder in our day to day about us being worthy. I just love her story because she has got serious hustle for a young person, she just started producing the keyrings, went to her local shopping centre, got a little market stand and she sold out on the first day. Then she built her own website, registered her own business and just went about getting it done.

There's something so inspiring in that the difference between an idea and an enterprise is actually taking action, and so Mikayla's ability to transform what was in her head to something in the real world is incredible for being 14 years old when I think a lot of us in adulthood struggle to make that transition from idea to enterprise sometimes.

That's one cool idea that I've seen but look I could talk about these ideas for ages. Our winners from the last two years before that were two teams from the Ipswich corridor that produced different pieces of apparel. Tanika from a couple of years ago produced socks that look like normal school socks above the surface because we've all got those uniform codes to adhere to in our schools, but they've also got these funky patterns underneath the shoe that she actually partnered with a graffiti artist to create.

The notion of the socks is that you don't know what's underneath the surface for young people with a portion of the profits going to Kids Helpline so that young people can access the support they need in their moments of need.

Then also, Culture Hood two years ago found out in researching problems in their community that the Polynesian community had higher rates of domestic violence than many other communities and they were quite horrified reflecting in their own community at that statistic. They dug in and created a line of hoodies with the proceeds going to support domestic violence initiatives to get domestic violence victims’ access to the support that they need in their moments of need as well. I think all of these three examples are interesting because these young people really dug deep on who they are and what they care about.

They uncovered a problem from their personal experience that they then worked to tackle. The more intrinsically you feel connected to the problem, the more likely you will be able to overcome those hurdles I think in trying to launch an idea.

Those are a couple of examples, but books oh my gosh! I actually set myself a challenge every year to try and read 52 books, so if I had to pick a couple that have really resonated for me I think Tim Ferris' The Four Hour Work Week is certainly not a new book, but it's one that every time I read it I pick up another couple of pieces of gold that I can bring into the way I do work every week. I think that's definitely one for me, [but also] Company Of One by Paul Jarvis is another book that challenged my notions on having to scale and what running a successful business can look like.

I think there's a lot of pressure on entrepreneurs to go big, and actually that book really brought me back to what is the core focus of the organisation and how to do that effectively.

Quiet by Susan Cain is another great book in the sense that it really talks about the power of the introvert. As an educator and also working in the entrepreneurship space that glorifies extroverts a lot of the time, it was really refreshing to read that book as well. Those are probably a couple of my favourites.

Three great books there, and some fantastic organisations and start-ups that you've mentioned too.

Thanks so much for sharing your generous insights and time and best of luck with your crowdfunding campaign for Catapult Cards on Kickstarter. I know it's coming to an end soon but it’s definitely a very strong idea, so it'll be great to see those get released.

Thanks Tom. The Kickstarter campaign has been heaps of fun to get around, and so if you're working in the education space or you're an organisation looking to activate your staff as intrapreneurs, then jump on Kickstarter, search for Catapult Cards and pick up a kit. We'd love to hear about what ideas you create as a result of using these incredible prompts.