Articles: 1,400 · Readers: 740,000 · Views: 2,209,961 The sources used to plan my business lesson are designed around the assessment objectives listed at the beginning of each unit in the business management textbook. The learning materials include worksheets, business newspapersand website articles from business media, content-relevant videos (e.g. Seth Godin – This is Marketing), photographs (e.g. ‘Back to school & Supermarket shelf with wine’). For a useful reference, I often refer to Schemes of Work samples obtained during workshops from other Business Management teachers from business schools around the world.
I used these sources to ‘connect instructional activities with desired outcomes’ (Ermeling and Graff-Ermeling, 2016). First, to help the students grasp bigger learning aims according to syllabus requirements and achieve differentiated – through skills, content, outcome – learning objectives for the first two marketing topics. Second, to make my lessons inclusive for all learners and design active teaching and learning activities that helped the students be more involved, ultimately leading toward making progress along with the content taught during the lesson. And third, to give myself an opportunity to use a wide range of formative assessmentmethods to measure, scaffold and evaluate the learners’ progress.
Inclusive learning in Business Management aims at making every student, without risk of marginalizing or excluding anyone, participate in learning about a company(s) of his or her choice and at his or her own pace challenging individual barriers to learning. Also, to encourage each learner to present his or her findings to others, that finally results inenablingthe pupils to learn from each other.
During the class, all students were given whiteboard markers to publicly share their opinions about ‘Who is an ideal customer?’, consequently involving all the students and not leaving any learner behind.
What helped to make students’ learning inclusive was, first, identifying their differentiated needs prior to the beginning of a new unit. I was able to do that through careful observation and summative assessment based on their learning history in the first semester. Second, offering them various learning activities and meaningful Assessment for Learning (AFL) methods that were skilfully differentiated. Third, allowing them (short face-to-face interviews) to choose on which aspect they would like to focus their time and energy on the most.
Active teaching and learning helped me and my students to establish and maintain good rapport with each other to make learning both important on the professional level and fun on the personal level. Offering a diversity of tasks (discussion, reading and creation) helped students to learn and progress more effectively, as the lessons were structured in the way to increase expectation in a progressive manner.
Through active learning, the students were given an opportunity to be personally engaged in their own learning by making own choices, which could indirectly help them to achieve similar future goals, with the help of familiar good habits and routines repeatedly learned in the Business Management classes.
The students could also easily apply what they had learned in the classroomto the real-world environment, and to measure their own success by abilities to provide their own examples for each business problem based on their personal observations, as making them in charge of their own learning motivate and results in more interest.
Learning resources were prepared after carefully identifying skills and knowledge that my learners already have (e.g. knowledge about methods of business growth from previous units) in connection with identifying what the learners wish to achieve (e.g.thestudents being able to analyse how Tesco became a market leader through mergers and acquisitions after reading provided articles and making a timeline). By explaining to the students prior to the activities what the purpose of learning activities and used materials is, I highlighted which competencies they will be developing.
Other reasons of choosing certain activities and resources include the cultural context of teaching in different countries, the need to follow a logical sequence ensuring confidence in what they will learn next, and on differentiation that could span a range of second-language abilities. The classroom setting was arranged in order to support group work, so all students would participate as there often was ample differentiation within those groups in the form of student roles.
They could perform tasks with slightly different expectations and were given different responsibility, for example, students who demonstrated higher achievement reading two articles instead of one and constructing more complicated position maps.
