Durham Academy Upper Schoolers are getting a big taste of the business world thanks to a course held in collaboration with District C, a nonprofit that empowers high schoolers around North Carolina to solve real-world problems for businesses and organizations.
The semester-long course — which will be known as Problem Solving for Real Businesses beginning this fall — is led by Upper School librarian Shannon Harris and library assistant Katherine Spruill, who serve as coaches for the budding business consultants by occasionally offering feedback or advice.
“We expect the students to do a lot of self-starting,” Spruill explained.
“I like to call it a hidden gem at DA because it’s an applied learning course,” junior Emily Gao said. “It’s where you can integrate all of the skills and lessons that you’ve learned from other classes at DA into a class where you can pitch [solutions for] problems essentially to companies that are really facing them in real time.”
As part of District C, students work in small teams to identify and solve actual problems facing local and global businesses and nonprofits. The course consists of three problem-solving cycles, involving the following steps: meeting with business partners; learning about the challenges they are facing; collaborating to develop solutions to their problems; and pitching their ideas.