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# We Changed Class Participation. Students Started Changing.
- URL: https://theinstitutionalist.jetri.com/we-changed-class-participation-students-started-changing/
- Published: 2026-08-10T23:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-13T08:00:35.000Z
- Description: A simple reflection exercise revealed something unexpected about how students learn.
- Author: Shreyasi Singh
- Tags: Essays

Last year, I taught entrepreneurship for the first time, co-facilitating a founderhood course with Pramath (Raj Sinha), my co-founder at Harappa, the online learning venture we had built between 2018 and 2024.

We followed a familiar structure — frameworks, cases, and discussions about building ventures — but some of our teaching choices were guided more by instinct than design. While we had designed learning experiences across many formats before, this was different. It was a full-credit elective at one of India’s leading business schools, delivered in an intensive “block week” format: twenty hours of teaching across five days, with two sessions each day. 

The model was new for the school, intended to expand its visiting faculty pool and make it possible for practitioners like us to spend sustained time in the classroom.

Like many entrepreneurship courses, the sessions focused on the core challenges of venture building. Students explored founder dilemmas. They debated strategy. They examined questions of trust, values, mission, and execution.

Yet as the course unfolded, we began noticing something we had not anticipated.

It began with a simple pedagogical choice. Because the format was new — and we were teaching a full course for the first time — we wanted a way to understand how students were experiencing the learning in real time, rather than waiting for end-of-course feedback. 

So we tied a brief daily reflection to class participation. At the end of each day, students wrote a short response — part of their participation grade — reflecting on three prompts: what they learned that day, what they specifically unlearned, and a question that stayed with them.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e1/e2/e1e21761-39df-46cb-91d9-75e753319ad6/content/images/2026/08/Screenshot-2026-08-11-at-13.32.21.png)

Over time, as we read these reflections day after day, something unexpected began to emerge.

The reflections slowly stopped describing the course. They started describing the self.

At first, students wrote about concepts.

> “I learned the difference between mission and vision.”   
> “The framework helped clarify strategy.”   
> “I understood how trust works in teams.”

But gradually the tone changed. The reflections became more personal, more searching. Students began writing about their values. Their fears. Their sense of direction.

> “I realized I’ve been pursuing success without asking what I truly value.”   
> “This made me question what kind of impact I want to create.”   
> “Writing down my mission has been quite liberating.”

Language shifted in subtle but striking ways. “The framework” became “my purpose.” What began as reflections on ideas gradually became reflections on identity.

What we were witnessing was not just learning. Something deeper seemed to be unfolding — a process of self-definition.

This was a course on founderhood and entrepreneurship. We expected students to learn how ideas are developed to create ventures. What we did not expect was to watch them actively reshape how they saw themselves — their agency, their aspirations, and their role in the world.

That realization led to a question that has stayed with me since:

**What if the most important outcome of education is not what students know, but who they become?**

## What We Began to See

At first, the shift was subtle.

Students continued writing about concepts and frameworks, but their reflections increasingly included moments of reconsideration. The prompt that seemed to open the most space was the simplest one: *What did you unlearn today?*

Students began describing assumptions they had not previously questioned.

*“I used to think success followed a linear path,”* one student wrote. *“Now I see that the path itself is often discovered along the way.”*

Another reflected on leadership:

*“I always thought confidence meant having answers. Today made me realize leadership might actually mean being comfortable with uncertainty.”*

Many of these moments were small — quiet recalibrations rather than dramatic realizations. Yet across days and weeks, the reflections revealed a consistent pattern.

Over time, the reflections accumulated. Across five sections of the school’s flagship management program, taught across two campuses, across two years, in February 2024 & February 2025, we collected more than **1,200 daily reflections from over 300 students**. 

It's reading them together and sequentially over the past few weeks, and plotting the day-to-day progression, made something unusual visible: learning unfolding not just as understanding, but as a process of becoming.

Students would first engage with an idea introduced in class — a framework about trust, a founder dilemma, founder-market fit, co-founder dynamics or a discussion about mission and strategy. Then they would begin questioning assumptions they had previously taken for granted. This questioning often led to a more introspective phase, where students began connecting the material to their own motivations and aspirations.

Gradually, reflections began shifting from explanation to inquiry.

*What do I actually want to build? What kind of impact matters to me? What holds me back?*

These were not questions we had asked explicitly. Yet they appeared repeatedly in the reflections. Soon after, a different tone began to emerge. Students started articulating a clearer sense of direction.

> “This helped me think about the life I want to build.”   
> “I realized my values matter more than the path I had assumed I would take.”   
> “I feel more inclined to pursue something meaningful rather than just successful.”

The language itself began to change. Early reflections described ideas. Later reflections described identity. “The framework” became “my approach.” “Entrepreneurs do this” became “I want to try this.”

This shift was unmistakable. The reflections were no longer simply about understanding entrepreneurship. They were about understanding the self in relation to possibility.

Without intending to, we had created a **longitudinal record of hundreds of students thinking out loud as their perspectives evolved through the week**.

And what became visible through that record was a progression that appeared repeatedly across reflections. The pattern looked something like this:

> Frameworks → Unlearning → Introspection → Identity → Agency

We had expected the reflections to help students engage more deeply with course material. Instead, they appeared to be helping students engage more deeply with themselves.

## Why Entrepreneurship Invites Identity Transformation

In retrospect, it is perhaps not surprising that this pattern emerged in a course on founderhood.

Entrepreneurship is inherently identity-intensive.

To imagine building something new is to confront fundamental questions: *What do I care about? What risks am I willing to take? What impact do I want to have? What kind of person must I become to lead others, make difficult decisions, and persist through uncertainty?*

Unlike many disciplines that focus primarily on external knowledge, entrepreneurship demands internal clarity. It asks individuals to define purpose, navigate ambiguity, and assume responsibility for shaping outcomes.

In other words, entrepreneurship is not only about building ventures. It is also about building the self. 

The reflection practice seemed to amplify this process. Students were not only learning about entrepreneurship. They were quietly working out who they might become while trying to build something of their own.

The classroom became a space where ideas and identity began interacting. And, by grading it as class participation, it ensured that it scaled. 

And in that process, something that usually remains invisible in education briefly came into view: learning not just as the acquisition of knowledge, but as the gradual formation of identity.

**Sometimes the most important learning in a classroom is not what students understand, but who they begin to see themselves becoming.**