How to encourage enterprising behaviour in students?

Our history of learning has an impact on the way we organise lessons today. We still have many teacher-led lectures with considerable focus on the content to be learnt. This paper discusses how we can give the initiative back to the students. The paper search for didactic elements in the teaching methods applied, which will provide the students with enterprising behavioural skills. For students to be enterprising we know that the learning environment must leave room for them to behave in an enterprising manner. Besides teaching methods that enhance enterprising behaviour we also need to consider basic psychological needs such as commitment, courage, competence, relationships and autonomy. A high degree of compliance with these five psychological needs generally generates a higher level of enterprising behaviour. The approach to the research question is based on different levels. The first level is a search for knowledge about the basic issue: is something happening in the classroom regarding the five psychological needs? The second level is a search for what happens in the classroom and the third level concerns studies about why this happens. Four important didactic elements were found to apply across educations: 1) active students, 2) involvement of practice, 3) creation of visible relevance and sense, and 4) the teacher as a didactic element per se. The findings underline the need for teachers to focus on their own enterprising behaviour in class as well as the enterprising behaviour of the students.