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This chapter demonstrates that for the effectiveness of entrepreneurship to be realised, the teachers must model initiative and be entrepreneurial themselves, so their students can acquire this skill. It starts by outlining A New Skills Agenda, with the European Commission launching a revision of the key competences with a special focus on to the promotion of entrepreneurial and innovation-oriented mindset. There is currently a need for a broader view of entrepreneurship beyond business creation. A sense of initiative and entrepreneurship represents a European key competence. It is part of a mindset for turning ideas into action which is transferrable to many contexts as well as being a lifelong learning perspective. Given the polysemy of entrepreneurship, the chapter defines the terms closely related to it: entrepreneurial education, entrepreneurship education, enterprise education, and a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship. Although entrepreneurship can be learned, research about how teachers should be trained and how they can teach in an entrepreneurial way is an underdeveloped area. Among the learning theories used in research to support entrepreneurial education, the theory of experiential learning has been the most extensively used. However, expansive learning is a learning theory of innovation and collective change of practices that is most suitable for entrepreneurial education. The Change Laboratory is a type of formative intervention useful to promote cycles of expansive learning, and it was challenged in the context of an Italian secondary school with a course in surveying that had been suffering a dramatic loss of enrolments after 2008. This study explores the extent with which a Change Laboratory as inservice training can be useful to promote a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship in the teaching staff.

According to Biggs’ theory of constructive alignment, when designing and delivering a course (not only of entrepreneurship) educators should consider a coherence between the learning outcomes, the teaching and learning activities and the assessment practices. Assessment in this context is defined as an educational practice serving to fill the gap between the desired outcomes and what the student has actually achieved; not only is assessment essential to promote learning in students, but also permits teachers to reflect on and enhance their programmes. This chapter concentrates on how to assess a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship (SIE) among students, in educational settings. It will do so by drawing on literature of key competences and entrepreneurial education. The key finding is that assessment cannot be a ‘one size fits all’ process, but should be tailored to the institution and environments, with the active collaboration of the stakeholders. The final part of the chapter shows three best practices of entrepreneurial education in Ohio with a focus on assessment and the development of the SIE questionnaire for the evaluation of the way teachers educate for a SIE.

This methodological chapter gives the reader an overview on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the theoretical framework used in the study, with expansive learning, a learning theory specific for collectiveness, innovation and change of social practices. Formative interventions, especially the Change Laboratory workshops, are designed to trigger cycles of expansive learning and are based on two principles, ‘double stimulation’ and ‘ascending from the abstract to the concrete’. The interactions during Change Laboratory workshops can be recorded for later analysis, thus allowing the study of expansive learning as concept formation and development of collective transformative agency. This chapter also outlines how to organize and conduct a Change Laboratory within an organisation and the various tasks that can be used to promote expansive learning actions. While Cultural-Historical Activity Theory is broad, disputed and multifaceted, this chapter is based on the research of Engeström, Sannino and Virkkunen because they provide the theoretical foundation upon which to conduct an effective Change Laboratory.

This chapter provides a thick description to make the reader understand the field research, which was carried out in an Italian secondary technical institute. This context was selected for the Change Laboratory, the issue being a dramatic fall in the number of enrolments for a course in surveying over the years. The teaching staff had not fully understood the changes in surveying caused by the crisis in the building sector and the school reform and were still training students to specialise as the pre-reform surveyor, with a curriculum centred on the construction of new buildings. Instead, the school reform and the job market called for a transformation of the curriculum towards the renovation and maintenance of already existing buildings, the environment and territory. The chapter describes the seven Change Laboratory workshops and the three follow-up workshops with the learning actions being triggered, the mirror materials and the topics of discussion. The idea being developed is that in the Grade 5 classes teachers teach around a common interdisciplinary hands-on project entailing the construction of a canteen in a parking lot close to the school. The project is designed around traditional technical topics but is dealt with as it was real, allowing students to make connections between subjects and to understand in depth the core concepts of surveying, and it is coordinated by the workshop assistants.

As Activity Theory is a theory focusing on the object, this chapter concentrates on the idea of hands-on multidisciplinary project that the teaching staff develop during the Change Laboratory workshops. It does so with the words of the people who are involved in the project: teachers, students and workshop assistants. Through interviews to the teaching staff and focus groups with students, the chapter will describe its historical antecedents, the features, the potentials and the challenges of the hands-on interdisciplinary project.

This chapter focuses on the outcome of the Change Laboratory, a hands-on interdisciplinary project to be carried out in two Grade 5 classes. During a follow-up workshop, the participants discuss the outcomes of the analysis that was described in the previous chapter, and features, potentials and challenges of the interdisciplinary project are discussed with the people involved in the project: teachers, workshop assistants and students’ representatives. Since many teachers refer to the interdisciplinary project as competence based, during the follow-up workshop, the participants evaluate the extent to which the interdisciplinary project had been delivered according to a competence approach. From one perspective, this approach is a way to validate research findings: participant validation strategies, also called member checks, are an oriented process centred on the participants to challenge the researcher’s interpretations by establishing the conditions for the study participants to talk about the research. These tasks are also designed expected to trigger the expansive learning action of reflecting on, and evaluating, the process to think what else needs to be learnt to improve the interdisciplinary project. The interdisciplinary project will be better implemented during the next school year by solving a tertiary contradiction between the old and the new object, division of labour, rules and tools. This strategy will help train the new figure of surveyor that the school reform and the job market have called for.

This conclusive chapter argues that the Change Laboratory intervention has an impact on the teaching staff, the students and the organisation, the role of the management being key in sustaining the change effort. A Change Laboratory intervention develops initiative and entrepreneurship in the teaching staff, both through its outcomes and during the formative process itself. Firstly, the outcome of Change Laboratory can be a new concept, and its implementation brings a renewal of pedagogy. The eventual result is to integrate entrepreneurship into the core of the school, as this change in teaching practice creates value. Second, the process of participation in the Change Laboratory causes the development of the teaching staff’s collective transformative agency, changing the focus of discourse from criticising the state of things and blaming others, to committing to implement a coordinated multidisciplinary project with new didactics. The participation process has also caused a switch from individual to collective actions. The Change Laboratory, therefore, demonstrates that entrepreneurship becomes a collective and social phenomenon where individuals face a problem that threatens their community. They take the lead and find a solution that creates value for themselves and their community. With the Change Laboratory for teachers in-service training, new ideas of pedagogical practices are transformed into collective action and value. This view of entrepreneurship emphasises the dimension of the sense of initiative and entrepreneurship as key competence for participation, citizenship and personal fulfilment, which provide the foundations for a New Skills Agenda.