Edutopia - October/November 2008 - (Page 37)

FINANCIAL Miami’s John A. Ferguson Senior High School recently began teaching its business-academy students ⇒nancial planning and how to create budgets. “Especially with the way the economy is headed these days, students need ⇒nancial literacy,” says Ferguson business teacher Diahann Holder. “I think that when they get a chance to see how to prepare a budget, how to prepare for the future, they learn more.” Julie Kantor, vice president of public policy of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), says that kids, after watching family members struggle ⇒nancially, also want to be their own bosses. “There’s a distrust of corporate America—they’ve seen family members get laid off,” Kantor says. “We have to prepare our young people to make it in a market economy.” LITERACY How To: Teach the Soft Side of Business It’s not all a zero-sum game. It’s always the little things that make the difference. True business education includes the soft skills, such as working well with others, that many employers say young workers lack. Teachers provided these tips on training students for the conference room: Create rules to get along. Most subjects are conducive to a group activity, whether it’s a complicated history project or a oneoff science experiment. Turn those small-group projects into lessons on teamwork. Laurie Fraser, a marketing teacher at Lincoln East High School, in Lincoln, Nebraska, takes a little class time to teach her students what it means to work in a group. Before embarking on the activity, each group decides how to delegate the work, who will be the leader, and when to meet. They also have to plan for how they’ll defuse conﬂicts. Fraser says this step can be hard because students don’t think they’ll get into disputes with their friends. Especially if the activity is a single project, make it clear to your students that only one idea will win the day, so they have to agree as a team. Fraser adds that this strategy forces each student to negotiate to get his or her idea on the table—and to acknowledge when somebody else has a better idea. Tackle time management. Fraser has her groups plan out the time they can work together on their projects, accounting for scheduling conﬂicts like sports events. Proper time management helps everyone stay on task and avoid the stress of the last-minute scramble. Try this: Have your students take out their planners at the start of each class and pencil in time to complete that day’s homework. When a student falters—say, the time set aside for geography homework got taken up by unexpected chores at home—it’s an opportunity to teach him or her how to troubleshoot and make adjustments when things don’t go as planned. Practice makes perfect. Greg Fisher, an economics and government teacher at the California Academy of Math and Science, in Carson, California, has his students do a number of outside-the-classroom presentations. But before they present one for real, they rehearse it in front of their classmates, complete with the business attire they plan to wear. Next time your students give class presentations, set up a system for peer assessment. For example, in Fisher’s government class, ﬁve students at a time track the news for a week and report it to the class. The rest of the students score the presentations. The beneﬁts: Each group performs better than the last because they see where other students went wrong. Shake a few hands. Handshakes offer a key ﬁrst impression, and students might not have any experience with proper execution. Have your students pair up, ﬁrst imitating a few bad handshakes—too limp, too strong, and too long—to illustrate the wrong way to do it. Then have them practice a ﬁrm, lightly enthusiastic handshake, and give each other feedback on how it felt. Put them in charge. It’s one thing to work well with others, but employers also want workers who are responsible and who can communicate clearly and conﬁdently. To help advance those skills, Fraser has her marketing students invite speakers to give talks in the school’s common area. They not only have to make the cold call to a prospective speaker; once the event is arranged, they also have to compose an email to invite other classes and are required to stand up to introduce the speaker to the audience. Shy students can practice making a cold call with an adult they know, like a parent or a teacher, and write out a script in case they get nervous. Here’s a tip: The next time you want to bring in a guest speaker, have your students handle the details. You can also consider a career day for which students decide who they want to hear from, then extend the invitations and come up with the questions to ask. The results, Fraser says, are worth it. “When we sort of open the ﬂoodgates, they realize they’ve got to be more responsible when they’re in charge,” she adds. “My favorite thing is watching that student who is shy and scared take that ﬁrst step.” EDUTOPIA.ORG EDUTOPIA 37 http://www.EDUTOPIA.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Edutopia - October/November 2008

Edutopia - October/November 2008 Contents UpFront Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of Class Cool Schools Design: Lessons from the Mall The Bucks Start Here Go Global: Virgil Rocks Big Ideas: Powerful Learning Mapping Their Futures Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Suze Orman

Edutopia - October/November 2008

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