differentiating and anticipating student needs

Next year I’ll be teaching business studies for the first time in my life. I will be at a new school, with new administrators, and different students than I am used to (I have worked mostly with native Chinese-speaking students who are learning English as a second language, but the school I will teach for next year is a true international school where Chinese passport holders would not be allowed admission.)  With all of this uncertainty, it is a good idea to plan out some objectives and both formative and summative assessments for lessons taught according to those objectives.  In my previous post you can read about that. While I don’t yet know which challenges I might have with my students, I do anticipate needed to integrate differentiation strategies in my teaching. Today I’ll discuss that focus.

Because this is a new school for me, I do not know for sure what challenges my students might have. However I anticipate that there will be some students with mild to medium learning disabilities like dyslexia or ADD/ADHD. I also anticipate some (but not all) students will be English language learners.

To accommodate for these students with learning disabilities, I plan to use multiple visual aids, speak slowly when necessary, repeat instructions, use non-verbal signals, and be as expressive as possible.

For the ELLs, I will allow and encourage language dictionaries or apps in class, and include instructions on the PPT so students can read instructions after I give them orally.

I also plan to have the students work together for the majority of the project. Their goal will be to understand several aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship well enough to be able to effectively analyze a business situation and give a presentation to the class about the best ways for a small business to adapt a new technology. This will require a deep level understanding of innovation, the barriers to adaption, and the enterprising elements that help overcome those barriers. I will group the students so that students with disabilities or language barriers will be able to work together with stronger students in order to learn from each other.

I will also be monitoring and providing feedback to individuals and to groups throughout the project. If I find that some students understand the material very quickly while other students really struggle with it, I will ask stronger students to take a leadership role inside the groups. Each member will need to present, so groups will need to work together and teach each other in order to succeed.

Resources I will make available to students include: language dictionaries, emailing the PPT to students to be able to review on their own, access to my personal Wechat account to ask questions after class, and partners within the peer groups who can teach/explain concepts and debate ideas in new ways.

formative and summative assessments for 5 objectives

Next year I’ll be teaching business studies for the first time in my life. I will be at a new school, with new administrators, and different students than I am used to (I have worked mostly with native Chinese-speaking students who are learning English as a second language, but the school I will teach for next year is a true international school where Chinese passport holders would not be allowed admission.)  With all of this uncertainty, it is a good idea to plan out some objectives and both formative and summative assessments for lessons taught according to those objectives.  In this quick post I’ll mention five objectives as well as both forms of assessments for each of those objectives. All of this is based on the standard “Demonstrate knowledge of innovation and entrepreneurship in business contexts.”

Objective #1: By the end of the lesson, 85% of students will be able to differentiate and identify different business types given specific information on a worksheet.

In class I will teach the class the different types of businesses and discuss the elements that differentiate the businesses. Formative assessments include asking students questions, monitoring students' independent work, and asking one-on-one follow up questions if it appears someone is confused. Summative assessment will be a worksheet given as homework that the students must complete individually.

Objective #2:  By the end of three class periods, 85% of students will be able to sort many different ways to add value to business through case studies of real-life innovation.

This lesson will include introduction of business case studies and class discussions about how innovation increased profitability or didn't, and why. Formative assessments will include class discussion, monitoring group discussions, and asking follow up questions, and begin an anecdotal record because this lesson is an important foundation lesson and it is important to know which students might be struggling.  Summative assessment will be a individually completed case study where students will identify and classify (sort) several different value-add opportunities from within the case study.

 Objective #3: By the end of the unit, all students will be able to orally explain what innovation is and why innovations sometimes are not adopted in society in a presentation to a group of peers according to a peer-evaluated rubric.

Formative assessments will include monitoring student preparation and giving feedback to students before their oral presentations. I will also follow up with students who have shown signs of frustration or struggle. I will need to keep notes in anecdotal records about student preparations and performance. Meanwhile the summative assessment will include both an oral presentation and peer evaluation according to a rubric.

Objective #4: by the end of two class periods, 95% of students will be able to list 10 enterprising behaviors and identify them in case studies. 

During these two periods, class instruction will include introducing multiple "enterprising behaviors" and how they manifest in real life. This learning will be reinforced with case studies. Formative assessments will include classroom interaction during the lecture and me monitoring the students during group work. Summative assessment will be a quiz where students will be asked to list all of the enterprising behaviors they can remember. Additional homework to be completed individually will be of a case study where students will be asked to identify evidence of the enterprising behaviors in the description of the case study. This homework should be completed between the first and second lessons.

Objective #5: By the end of the unit, all students will be able to evaluate effective business opportunities within a case study about a new innovation and the barriers to market adoption in an essay. 

During this unit students will be showing they truly understand the content on a deep level by breaking down case studies to create their own solutions to another, new businesses problems. Formative assessments will include class time interaction and feedback as well as anecdotal note taking on any struggling or outstanding students. Summative assessments will be the actual essay that is written by the students.

Reflection on Unpacking Standards

As a rookie teacher, I admit that I make many of the mistakes discussed in the content for this activity. It is quite common for me to plan my daily activities around the textbook or other content that I have available. I haven’t really second-guessed this strategy. I’m not aware that any teachers around me follow any other strategy either.

Now, however, I can see a much better way. Grant Wiggins taught several teachers about how unpacking standards works. Ultimately, the teacher begins with the end in mind. What is the most important thing for students to experience/learn/acquire/create as a result of this class/unit? Based on the answer to this question, teachers can then work backwards to create goals, activities/projects, and lesson plans. Teachers would look at their textbooks and ask themselves, if these are our goals, what should we do with the resources available? If my goal is for my students to love reading by the end of the year, I will need to prepare my classes very differently vs. a goal to have my students reach some level of reading proficiency by the end of the year.

            As an example, Grant Wiggins showed a sample math unit. He began by showing a list of 77 runners. These runners all competed in many different races. Sometimes they raced against each other, but never did all 77 runners run the same race at the same time. Based on their results, what is a fair way to rank them all? After some class discussion about the definition of “fair,” the students were broken into small groups to discuss. And find some way to rank all the runners.

            The next day, the teacher asked the students to decide a fair way to grade them over the course of the year. Students again had a class-wide discussion, and then broke into groups to continue the debate and then come up with a plan to grade all of the students.

            The third lesson students presented their plans for the runners and the student grades, and debated some more. They discovered it was very difficult to rank the runners in a way that everyone agreed was fair. Similarly, they had a difficult time figuring out how the teacher should grade the class most fairly.

            During the fourth lesson, for the first time, the teacher introduces some math principles which are taught in the textbook.

“It turns out math gives us some tools to judge this. Let’s open the books and learn about mean, median, mode…”  This is the first time students open their textbooks during the unit….

I love this unit and the way it is taught because students are already deep into the real-world application of the math principles before the principles are even introduced. This way all students will know WHY they are learning the concepts and will be more interested in correctly applying the math. When the students understand how the math is useful and also have a desire to solve a real life problem using math, it becomes exciting to learn the principles and apply them. I think if more students learned math this way, there would be a lot less animosity towards math.

In my business class I need to structure learning the same way.  The best way to teach my content will be for me to find case studies and have the students solve the case studies. When they really understand how challenging it would be to resolve issues for all sides, then we introduce economic principles or the need for regulation and how it is applied. Once we solve problems within our case studies, the students can then very effectively analyze the correct and incorrect application of business principles in real life examples from around the world. At that point conversations about why Hong Kong has the most expensive real estate in the world, or why the US housing market imploded in 2008 will be far more meaningful and fun for the students.

I will also be sure to emphasize our class goals throughout the year. My hope is that at any given moment I can ask the students what standards we are working towards are and they will know them.  I also like the idea of planning around the end result because I think it will help me keep a better perspective when I plan the amount of time each unit deserves. The pace of our class will be dictated by the standards and the students, not the textbooks. Based on this unpacking of the standards, I will know which content needs more in-depth discussion, and which content can be skimmed over or even skipped completely. Textbooks, after all, were written for a wide-ranging audience, not specifically for my students in my class.

I’m excited (and a little bit intimidated) by this perspective. I’m also excited for my students. I hope this process will help us be more effective at helping the students develop a love of innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as a deep respect for the markets and the way they work. I also want them to understand economic principles well enough that when detrimental policy changes are proposed, they will be able recognize and teach others why the new policies would be a bad idea. I’ve got an exciting year ahead of me!

Unpacking Business Standards

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 11^th and 12^th grade students, and this post is about my plan for a unit with my 11^th 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)