In preparation to teach business
studies next year, I have been studying Grant Wiggin’s philosophies entitled
“understanding by design.” I have tremendous business experience and fairly
strong teaching experience, but this coming year will be my first time teaching
business as a subject in school. I’m excited. I will be teaching business
studies to 11th and 12th grade students, and this post is
about my plan for a unit with my 11th graders. I will be teaching at
an international school in China and will be using standard 22847 from the IB.
I chose this standard because I think it is one of the basic building blocks
that business studies depends on. If I am not effective in transferring this
skillset to the students, they will have a difficult time applying any of the
later lessons and skills. In this post I will describe how I intend to help my
students demonstrate knowledge of innovation and entrepreneurship in business
contexts (standard 22847.) To accomplish this, I will need the students to
become proficient in several skills. I intend to help my students develop these
skills through activities and projects, which I will also describe here. The
students will need to demonstrate to me and to themselves that they can
identify and reproduce innovation and entrepreneurship in business settings by
completed targeted assessments, which I will also describe here.
To be sure we are all on the
same page, I will use the following definitions within this unit:
Business context refers to activity within a specific business entity which may be – for profit or
non-profit; in private, public, or voluntary sectors; a business unit, or other
special purpose body.
Entrepreneurship – enterprising behaviors
which support identifying business opportunities, and organizing, managing, and
assuming the risks of a business organization.
Innovation – the creation and
application of something which adds value to the business, which may include
but is not limited to a new or enhanced product or service or process.
Our first objective will be to
correctly identify enterprising behaviors in business people. This will be accomplished with a classroom
discussion, including video and powerpoint presentations to engage the students
and teach the new concept. Assessment will be done through simple class
discussion and a quick quiz the next day in class.
After the students clear about
the types of behaviors exhibited, our second objective will be to correctly
identify innovation and entrepreneurship within the context of a small
business. I anticipate that many students will come into the unit with many
misconceptions of what comprises innovation. Thus the first competency will be
correctly identifying and describing innovation with reference to business. To
accomplish this, the students will be asked to observe descriptions of
products, services, or processes and articulate how it is or is not new or
enhanced. Students should be able to produce their own examples and report
their findings back to the class in the form of a group discussion. Those group
discussions will eventually lead to far more comprehensive projects, also
completed in groups, which I will describe later.
Our second, related competency,
will be correctly identifying and describing entrepreneurship with reference to
business. To accomplish this, students should similarly be able to observe
examples, and correctly identify business roles, business opportunities, risks
involved, resulting businesses, and personnel elements relevant to the
successful completion of the entrepreneurial effort. Ultimately this effort
should be not only observable, but also measurable. Again students will be
asked to research their own examples as homework and return to their own groups
to describe and defend their findings.
After observing and correctly
identifying elements of effective innovation and entrepreneurship in class, and
then demonstrating deeper understanding by independently researching and
presenting new examples from the “real world,” student groups will be asked to
work together on an innovation/entrepreneurship project. With their group, they
will take the best local example of entrepreneurship or innovation and do
personal, deep-dive research into the origins of that success. The group will
need to contact the local company/group/individual who showed excellent
innovation or entrepreneurship, and set up an interview. Students in the group
will generate their own set of questions and prepare a time to video an
interview between one of the students in the group, and the business
professional. Questions should include things like “how did you identify the
need for __________” or “did solving this problem have any unintended
consequences, either positive or negative?” etc. Students will then edit their
interview into a feature interview video, and share with the class. Students
will also show business manners and savvy by creating a genuine and effective means
of expressing gratitude to the business owner (preferably in a way that adds
value to the business.)
To review, our three proficiencies are:
1)
identifying enterprising behaviors in business
people
2)
identifying innovation and describing it with
reference to real-world business examples
3)
Identifying entrepreneurship and describing it
with reference to real-world business examples
Our three assessments are:
1)
class discussion and quiz (for proficiency #1)
2)
completing individual research to identify real
examples of both innovation and entrepreneurship (for proficiencies #2 & 3
3)
defending individual research in front of peers
(in a small group setting) and teacher (for proficiencies #2 & 3)
Our learning experiences and activities include, but are not
limited to:
1)
class discussion
2)
individual research
3)
defending research in a small group and to a
teacher
4)
collaborating with small group to create a
presentation highlighting a local innovator or entrepreneur (this project
involves many skills and activities)
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