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01 Introduction

1. SHORT SUMMARY

• Total duration of this lesson: 45 minutes• What will the students learn?

o Find out the goals of the GREENT course, its structure and activities and at the end of the lesson they will have an idea what kind of skills and attitudes they will develop through their participation in the course.

• What will the students do during this lesson?o Watch a videoo Share their expectations from the courseo Play an entrepreneurial gameo Fill in a pre-test with a self-assessment element

• What skills are the students going to improve? o Entrepreneurial skillso Creativityo Listening, viewing and reading comprehensiono Reflection abilities and self-assessment skillso Presentation skillso Business modelling

• Cross-curricular links:o Economics/entrepreneurshipo Philosophyo Biologyo Geography

• Materials needed:o Multimedia projectoro Laptop / computer with speakerso Internet connection in the classroom (if there is no Internet in your classroom,

you can download the online videos in this lesson in advance and bring them on a flash drive, or alternatively you can ask students to form groups and use their smartphones/tablets in order to watch the videos)

o A set of sticky noteso A3 papero Permanent or non-permanent markers of different colors (4-5 sets of 3-4 colors)

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Lesson 01(1

1 m

in.)

CORE 2. INTRO – what is the GREENT course about?

2.1. Video

Greet the students and tell them that they are going to watch an impressive video right away:

“Before the Flood Official Trailer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UGsRcxaSAI (2:53 min.)

Ask the students if they know who the main person in the video is. What is he known for? (Students will probably say he is a world-famous actor – Leonardo DiCaprio – but let them know that he is also a yearlong passionate supporter of the environment, donating millions of dollars to organiza-tions that help restore the ecological balance on Earth. He can be an inspiration to all of us with his bold action and public position about climate change, one of the most important challenges that humanity faces today. But there also hundreds of thousands of people like him around the world.)

Alternative option: If you do not have a multimedia projector in the classroom, provide the link to the students and ask them to watch the video on their smartphones/tablets. If not everyone has a device, let them group together so that they can watch.

2.2. Expectations

Give out to each student a couple of empty sticky notes. Ask them to write down their expectations from the course. Green color is for new things they expect to learn. Pink color is for skills they ex-pect to develop. Yellow color is for questions they have. Direct the students that they should only put one idea per sticky note. Leave the students 3 min. to write their expectations and invite them to stick the notes to the wall/whiteboard/other suitable surface in the classroom.

Tell the students that you will carefully review their expectations and try to live up to all of them in the duration of the course. Keep those sticky notes because you will use them in the final lesson when you are going to ask the students to determine if their expectations have been met.

High-tech option: Students may use their smartphone, tablet or computer to share their ideas on www.padlet.com.

Source: https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2015/05/MAY15_26_456701506.jpg.

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Introduction

2.3. Goals of the GREENT course

Tell the students that in the GREENT course our main goal is to accompany them on the journey to learning to live more humbly (or in other words sustainably), learning to be happy with having less material stuff and more memorable experiences.

Show them the following diagram (display it on the screen with the help of a projector or print it out on a poster), which depicts the main units of the GREENT course. First, students will learn about systems and natural systems, then they will learn about how human systems have influenced natural systems negatively, especially in the last couple of centuries, and what challenges this has caused. Then they will find out how sustainability can address these issues. Then they will learn about entrepreneurship and green entrepreneurship and how sustainable businesses are created. In the end, they will try coming up with their own green entrepreneurship idea:

The course will help them see the beauty of our planet and its vital ecosystems that support the functioning of our societies. It will help them develop their environmental responsibility and apply it to generating and shaping innovative ideas for sustainable businesses. They will develop their entrepreneurial skills, their innovative and creative thinking, they will learn to see the big picture.

At the end they will know much more about concepts like biodiversity, climate change, sustainabili-ty, the four sustainability principles, circular economy and many more. They will play a lot of games and practical activities where they will be able to master their teamwork, presentation skills, and problem-solving skills.

Tell the students that this course is all about taking personal action in one’s life and that the things they will learn will help them lead a more sustainable life and realize initiatives for the benefit of society and the environment. Tell them that for sure it is not easy to believe your single actions can make a difference on the larger scale even if you strongly believe that what you do is meaningful. But there are examples how many individual actions combined together have led to incredible and beautiful change.

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Lesson 01(2

2 m

in.)

CORE

Share with the students the following story which is taken from the book “Cooler smarter: practical steps for low-carbon living: expert advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists” by Seth Shulman (p. 4).

In the beginning of the 1990s, Nora Gross was a 4-year old little girl. She grew up in New York. One day she told her father that she wanted to give her penny collection to a homeless man that she passed by every day on the street near her home. Being a kid, Nora thought that if everyone did what she was ready to, there wouldn’t be homeless people on the streets. Instead of telling her that her pennies couldn’t possibly make a difference to solving such a huge problem like homeless-ness, her father, who was touched by her compassion to a stranger, encouraged her to realize her idea. Very soon, the two of them founded an organization called Common Cents through which they harvest spare pennies. In a couple of years, the magnitude of Nora’s idea became incredible. Since she founded the organization, more than a million children around the country collected almost 1 billion pennies! This makes 10 million USD – enough money to alleviate the situation of thousands of homeless people. And if Nora had thought that she couldn’t make a difference, none of these people would have received help.

3. PRACTICAL ACTIVITY

Tell the students that now they are going to participate in an entrepreneurial game – “Guess the Entrepreneur”. Here is how you can organize it:

1. Divide the class into groups of 4-5 students. Each group needs to have a table to work on.

2. Distribute an A3 paper and a set of color markers/pencils to each group.

3. Announce the rules of the challenge: Each team has to decide on one real-life entrepreneur that they know well – it can be someone from their country or from abroad. Then they will have to draw the figure/face of that entrepreneur on the A3 paper using the provided markers. They should not disclose the name of the entrepreneur or the name of his/her company. They should think of a way to describe visually the story of the entrepreneur very briefly: e.g. his/her interests, education, beliefs, motto, place of residence, etc. They can use their smartphones/tablets/laptops to research that part. Teams that choose to work on a sustainable entrepreneur will receive bonus points in the end.

4. The next stage for the teams is to describe the product/service of the entrepreneur’s com-pany answering the following questions:

− What is unique about this product/service?

− What are the client needs it satisfies? What value does it deliver to the customer?

They can draw the product itself on the A3 paper, but they should make sure the brand name is not visible. And they can write the answers to the questions somewhere on the paper too.

5. In the next phase the teams should answer the following questions related to their chosen product:

− What resources are needed to produce that product/service?

6. In the next phase the teams should address and write down the answers of these questions on the A3 paper next to the figure of their entrepreneur:

− Who are the clients of this product/service?

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Introduction

7. Allow all teams 15 min. in total to complete the previous stages. You can display the scheme below on the projector or print it out and put up on the whiteboard to assist the teams in their work so that they don’t forget the questions. As mentioned, they can use their smart-phones in order to find information to answer the questions. Encourage the teams to dis-tribute the work between the team members so that they can manage in time.

8. After all teams are ready with their posters, ask them to pin them to the wall.

9. Allow the teams 3 min. in total to look closely at the posters of the other teams.

10. Announce that everyone is now invited to guess the name of the entrepreneur and compa-ny on Poster No. 1 by raising their hands before speaking. The first team to guess correctly wins 1 point. Continue like that until all posters are finished. Then announce the winner of the competition. Teams that created a poster of a sustainable entrepreneur get one bonus point, so don’t forget to add that up.

11. Tell the students that you will keep the posters. Later in the course they will be able to com-pare how their perceptions and skills have changed over time.

4. PRE-TEST AND SELF-ASSESSMENT

Tell the students that now they will have time to fill in a pre-test individually. The idea of this test is to check what their existing knowledge and notions about the subject matter of the GREENT course are. It also contains some self-assessment questions related to their skills and attitudes. At the end of the course, they will fill in the same questionnaire and will be able to see how their knowledge and skills evolved and improved over time. Allow 10 min. for the completion of the questionnaire.

Hi-tech option: If you can hold this lesson in an IT lab in your school where every student can be seated on an individual computer, please access the electronic version of the test at: http://jabulgaria.org/limesurvey/index.php/714546?lang=en. Let the students fill in their anonymous responses online. You can obtain the class code from your national or regional Junior Achieve-ment office.

Low-tech option: You can print out the printable version of the questionnaire and distribute it to every student in the class. After the students have completed the test, collect their papers and provide them to your Junior Achievement office.

5. A LOOK INTO THE FUTURE

Finish by telling the students that living sustainably doesn’t mean going back to the Middle Ages and reading on candlelight or freezing at home in the winter. There are smart solutions you can adopt to decrease your environmental footprint and still live a very (if not even more) comfortable life and even smarter solutions you can think of as a green entrepreneur and contribute to the sus-tainable lifestyle of other people, achieving an even larger-scale impact for the planet.

Tell the students that in the second lesson of the GREENT course, through some interesting activi-ties and videos, they will get a basic understanding of systems theory and overview of systems and how they work.

(12

min

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CORE