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.