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About The Mini-Society®
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What is Mini-Society
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| The Mini-Society
is an experience-based instructional system targeted primarily
for teaching entrepreneurship, economics, and citizenship concepts
to students ages 8 to 12. It was conceived by Dr. Marilyn Kourilsky
in the early 1970s and has been refined, extended, and extensively
tested over a period of nearly three decades. Mini-Society has
been widely implemented in over 43 states and has been shown
to be effective across socioeconomic boundaries and student
learning styles. Mini-Society has also established its effectiveness
outside of the traditional classroom setting, in outside-of-school
and summer camp venues such as 4-H clubs. |
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How
does Mini-Society work?
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In the
Mini-Society, students develop a self-organizing economic
society with the consultative guidance of the teacher, driven
by the need to resolve a classroom situation involving the
fundamental economic issues of scarcity and allocation of
resources. The children begin to identify opportunities in
their environment and initiate entrepreneurship ventures to
provide goods and services to their fellow citizens. As the
system swings into action, the spontaneous entrepreneurship,
consumer, and social experiences and interactions of the students
are woven into an instructional fabric that emphasizes learning
in economics and the social sciences. The knowledge and skills
acquired through Mini-Society also incorporate and complement
other thematic curricula and pedagogues including language
arts, math, government and law, ethics, and cooperative learning.
The system
is typically implemented in 10 or 20 week increments, three
sessions per week, with each session lasting about 45 minutes
to 1 hour. Teachers are carefully trained how to exercise
facilitative and consultative roles (as opposed to their more
traditional lecturing and classroom management roles) to maximize
the system's ability to enable student learning in target
subject areas. They also are taught how to identify experiential
trigger points ("teachable moments") and to leverage those
teachable moments through the use of teacher-led structured
debriefings. These debriefings correlate the experiential
learning of the students with the more formal subject matter
concepts their experiences reflect. This correlation with
and building upon experiences representing familiar knowledge
to the students enable the teachers to advance their students
progressively to higher and higher levels of understanding
and application.
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How
do the children benefit from Mini-Society?
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Mini-Society
is based on the belief that experience is the best teacher.
The Mini-Society is an ongoing process of directly experiencing
mature entrepreneurship, economic, social, ethical, and political
problems, exploring various resolutions and their implications,
and instituting solutions and experiencing the consequences
of one's decisions. Because the Mini-Society is not just a
simulation but a real world to the students, it becomes a
highly motivating instructional system, encouraging independent,
creative, self-directed inquiry learning by the students,
with guidance from the teacher. Mini-Society students also
exhibit measurable increases in positive attitudes toward
school and learning.
Through
Mini-Society, then, children:
- Develop
and experience their own "real world" in the context of
entrepreneurship
- Acquire
concepts and skills in multiple subject areas
- Discover
the importance of cooperation
- Are
motivated to marshal their own creative and logical resources
- Learn
about setting and achieving goals
- Enhance
their sense of empowerment and self-sufficiency
- Have
fun
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