The hands-on activities and teaching techniques in the curriculum will transform your entrepreneurship course into a challenging, life-changing, learning experience. These are some of our key classroom strategies:
Our teaching methods are student centered. We start where the student is. We show students that they manage money or conduct business everyday of their lives. They already know a great deal about being a buyer, a customer, and a consumer. We motivate them by suggesting that they can take all of the information they have gathered as consumers and use it to become business owners and smart financial managers.
We relate lessons to students’ common experiences. If we want to teach a lesson on cash flow forecasting, we might introduce the lessons by asking students to share times when they have run out of money. Then we explain that one tool businesses use to keep from running out of money is a cash flow projection. Students may have created informal cash flow projections when they planned how to make their allowance last all week or how to keep from running out of money while on vacation. Relating the lesson to students’ life experiences breaks down the intimidation of leaving a new business principle.
We expect the best from the students and reward creativity. We are always looking for ways to bring out students’ talents and skills and show them their ideas and opinions are important. What students love about entrepreneurship is the opportunity to express themselves through the development of a business concept. We want them to think outside the box. Our curriculum is designed to challenge pre-conceived ideas, encourage creative problem solving, and promote independent thinking.
We try to limit class lectures to 10 minutes. We always break up long lectures or explanations of complicated business concepts with case studies, stories or anecdotes, class situations, small group work, or other activities. We try to avoid presenting information without allowing students time to actually use the information in some way. As we teach the course, we plan to follow a lecture with an activity where the students are required to think and use the information we have just explained.
We use multiple methods of presentation that appeal to all learning styles. Students need to hear it, see it, and touch it. When you are presenting important information or concepts, try to use visuals to illustrate your points. This could be anything drawing a diagram on the board to doing a PowerPoint presentation with the small group activities outlines in the lesson, and allow students to “touch” and use the new information you have presented.
We like to make our classrooms look exciting. Simply bringing something unusual into the classroom –
or even arranging the room in an unusual way – can spark students’ attention and often spark creativity. Our curriculum includes unique activities and projects designed to make students wonder what we are going to do next!
or even arranging the room in an unusual way – can spark students’ attention and often spark creativity. Our curriculum includes unique activities and projects designed to make students wonder what we are going to do next!
We recommend bringing in business resource persons. Introduce your class to businesspeople who are inspiring ad knowledgeable. When a speaker visits the class, make sure students are prepared to actively participate. We encourage the students to write down questions they want to ask the guest. Instruct the guest to speak very briefly, and then allow the students to “interview them”.
We try to create a business environment in the classroom. As often as possible, give the students real-world tools for doing business – not typical school supplies, but office supplies students might use in operating a future business. Use the suggestions in the curriculum to incorporate computer work and internet activities in your lessons. Bring in recent business magazines and newspapers for students to read. Run your classroom like a business. Don’t give them homework, for example. Instead, give them team assignments and projects they have to work on at home.
We allow students to work in small groups as often as possible. Teenagers love social interaction. Almost every lesson in our curriculum recommends splitting into small groups for a portion of the lesson. We give them assignments and let them report back to the whole class about what they learned or accomplished. Our goal is to make sure that every student in the classroom is a participant – not just an observer.
We recommend object lessons to illustrate difficult concepts. When we have a difficult financial concept to tech, such as the difference between simple interest and compound interest, we try to use a physical illustration or demonstration. For example, if you put two baskets or jars on a table. Using strips of green paper to represent dollar bills, and show how much faster the jar for compound interest fills up with money than the jar for the simple interest.
We engage students in long-term projects such as writing a business plan or developing a marketing campaign. To keep students on track, the curriculum provides intermediate deadlines and milestones for larger projects. As much as possible, our goal is for students to work in small groups (or independently) towards goals they set for their projects. We let them know that how much they learn is up to them – they decide what to make out of the opportunity we are giving them through this course of study.
We encourage independent thinking and decision making. Business is an “art” more than a “science”. Making decisions in business sometimes boils down to just using your best judgment. So instead of telling students what choice they should make about an issue, we put students into pairs and have them debate both sides of the question with each other. (For example: entrepreneurs versus job-takers, or spenders versus savers.) As often as possible, we ask, “open-ended” questions and encourage students to work out their own answers.
We don’t overlook those who struggle. Entrepreneurship education is an extremely positive experience for students with learning disabilities or lower academic skills. In most cases, struggling students love Young entrepreneurship courses because they are designed for students to learn primarily through hands-on activities. Even if some of your students have poor reading skills that they cannot read the lessons in the student booklets, they can participate in the classroom activities and learn the business principles presented in each lesson. This is one classroom where the lower academic skills can do just as well as any other student in the class – and sometimes better.
We consider ourselves in the classroom of life. Entrepreneurship is not just about knowing all the right business terms or using the right financial formulas – it is also about ethics and integrity, learning to keep your word when you tell a customer you’ll do something, and becoming a responsible citizen within your community. In our course, anything in the real world is a possible teaching tool. Every question is a “teachable moment”. Every business problem or obstacle is an opportunity to learn. Every news article on CNN or in the headlines of the local paper is fodder for a classroom discussion.
