Leonard Reeves ECI 541 September 18, 2007

  1. Introduction
  1. Contextualization of Lesson
  1. Setting

Southeast Raleigh Magnet High School is a magnet high school focused on leadership and technology. The school climate has dramatically changed since its birth 11 years ago. Southeast had a major shift in nodes a few years and the population became mostly baseI don’t understand this—could you elaborate?.Many of the original Southeast Bulldogs were disheartened with this move and felt betrayed by Central Office. The school began to suffer immediately from the changes in population. The base population surrounding the school is categorized into lower-middle class to poor and mostly minority (African-American). After the inset of the new population, standardized test scores began to fall, discipline became an issue, crime rates rose, and morale began to suffer. The school has been through 3 staff related scandals in the past 4 years, which has affected the way the community views the school. This is better description-just tell what base and nodes means.

Two years ago, when I came to Southeast, a new principal was taking office as well. A change in leadership brings about a whole new set of issues beyond the current issues the school was already handling. Students were reacting negatively towards the new principal along with several members of the staff. I found myself trying to fit into a program that was on shaky ground. I focused on building a structured classroom that would foster relationship building. If I couldn’t foster strong relationship building in the entire school, I could certainly control the environment in my own classroom. Over the next two years, I developed strong relationships with students, which has helped to give some sense of stability amidst all of the changes.

Southeast is on the 4x4 block schedule with 90 minute classes. The classroom has 30 computers aligned in 4 rows of 4, one row perpendicular with 5 computers, and computers running along the far side of the room from my desk. I teach two sections of Marketing I and one Sports and Entertainment Marketing I currently. Both courses are introductory and elective courses for students. My current group of students range from ninth to twelfth grade. I have juniors, seniors, sophomore, and freshmen in descending order. Southeast is on a modified year round schedule, which puts us at midterms this week. This assignment could not have come at a better time. I chose this assignment to help in review with most students and to teach some students that have come in late to the class due to transfer. Prior to this lesson, students have learned about the different types of business ownership. This information was learned several weeks ago and students need a major pick-me-up before heading into my comprehensive midterm.

  1. Text

The reading for this assignment is supplemental to my students. I found this text at EconEdLInk as part of the “Business Ownership: How Sweet It Can Be!” lesson, which provides several activities and suggestions on the subject of business ownership. I selected the “Sweet Opportunities” activity the text provides a lookRun-on sentences at real life examples to the material they are studying. The students are using prior knowledge from earlier lessons in the Marketing class. The text is meant to have students use vocabulary and apply concepts towards given scenarios. The readability of this assignment is very high. The assignment is written as a first person narrative with fairly simple language. The text is centered on the chocolate candy industry, which always gets the attention of students. Students should be able to read this activity on their own without any guidance. Your assignment meets the requirements for an SRE, but the purpose of an SRE is to help students read a text that is too difficult for them, to enable them to read a text they may struggle with. This assignment can stand as it is with a few changes, but I would suggest using it with lower readers as well. That way, it really serves as an SRE.

  1. Students

Students are mainly African-American in the school, as well with my classroom. I have a great mixture of male and female, which tends to be true with marketing classes throughout Southeast’s history. My students are average performers in school with a wide variation. A few students in the class are high performers and even more students perform below average in school. The overall reading level is below grade level in my class. Vocabulary and dialect can be culturally challenging. I work heavily with my students on vocabulary and jargon to develop their knowledge throughout the semester. The main reason this Sweet Opportunities text works in my classroom is because of the easy readability. Students that I have with reading comprehension problems can get this assignment fairly easily and this allows the entire class to participate.

  1. Philosophical/Theoretical Rationale:

Vocabulary knowledge and application is a problem within the marketing classroom. Within the marketing curriculum, there is a vast amount of jargon and technical vocabulary. My experience has shown me that students must know be able to read and understand terms and ideas before they grasp concepts. I believe strongly in speaking the “language” of marketing in the classroom and being able to use terms fluently with my students. It is very important for my students to see vocabulary, learn it, and review it on a regular basis. When VoCATS test become reality at the end of the year for my students, the vocabulary barrier is a very large part of their inability to read and comprehend the test which they take.

I review ideas in my classroom that require my students to recall and apply concepts. Students must know vocabulary for this application to be possible. I specifically chose this lesson to cover important vocabulary and refresh concepts previously learned. I said that we must talk the language of marketing in my classroom, and I feel it very appropriate to include a discussion that is student led. Using the B-D-A Lesson (Vacca & Vacca, p. 354) and reflective discussions (Vacca & Vacca, p. 235) for this lesson, my need to stay Vocabulary and concept focused are met. I am able to let students recall vocabulary, apply vocabulary and concepts to a real-life scenario, and gain important information from peers in a group discussion. Students are now taking learning into their own hands with a discussion where I play a minor part.

  1. Lesson Plan
  1. Instructional Objectives:

After instruction, students will be able to correctly evaluate scenario based questions on business ownership.

  1. Materials/Equipment:

Pre-Reading Phase

LCD Projector
Laptop
PowerPoint
Internet

Reading Phase

Digital Copy (PDF) of Sweet Opportunities

Post-Reading Phase

Notebook paper/MSWord
Cookies/Chocolate Candy/Candy Bars

  1. Three Phase:
  1. Pre-reading (10-15 minutes)

As the lesson begins I have the LCD projector turned on with a PowerPoint slide projected.

______

Types of Business Ownership

  • A sole proprietorship is a business owned and operated by one person
  • A partnership is a business owned and operated by two or more people
  • A corporation is a business owned by stockholders
  • Subchapter “S” corporations are taxed like a sole proprietorship and limited to 35 or less shareholders

______

I read over this slide and remind students that we’ve already covered this material. I review to make sure students have the correct information in mind. The material is weeks old and may become lost in the shuffle of new learned information. This serves as “activating prior knowledge” (Vacca and Vacca, 2008, p 346.). I remind the students of the coming midterm and direct this as a review activity to get them prepared for the test. I ask the students to break up into groups of 3 or 4 students. The students will all migrate to their corners. Students will log onto my website, which is routine in my classroom.

I instruct students to pull up the Sweet Opportunities assignment and read the text. I instruct the students to write or type, as a group, the type of ownership they believe would be best for the scenario they just read. I tell the students to stop after they have finished each of the four readings and raise their hand to let me know they are done reading.

  1. Reading (5 minutes per scenario/ 20minutes total)

While students read they use their freshly renewed prior knowledge to make a hypothesis of what type of business ownership the scenario would fit best into.

  1. Post Reading (20-30 minutes)

Each time a scenario has been read the students will briefly discuss and chose a type of business ownership that matches the scenario. After all of the reading has been accomplished I ask the groups to, again, discuss the types of business ownerships for each scenario and now give reasons for choosing.

I know start a group discussion in the classroom. Each group is assigned on scenario to speak about. They must stand in front of the room and present their case. After the assigned group speaks, the floor is open for discussion. I only ask that students call on each other, instead of blurting questions and comments out.

Students now have their hypothesis and predictions tested against other students. At this point I do not tell the students the right or wrong answer, I let them debate over their thoughts. I do instruct that students give sound answers backed by previously learned knowledge. Students may not answer with “Because I think it is.” After the students have discussed their views on each of the four scenarios, I share the answers with them. For each scenario there may be more than one correct answer. I take questions any questions from students. I then let the students know who the scenarios represent (Chocolate Farm, Milton Hershey, Forrest Mars, and Wally Amos) and I pass out small samplings of M&Ms, Hershey’s Fun Size bars, and Famous Amos cookies.

  1. Assessment:

I collect the answer sheet that each group writes down. On this answer sheet, each student will have written down their choice for business ownership of each scenario and a brief summary of why they believe it to be. The open discussion during the lesson lets students take charge over their own learning and comprehension. I will refocus the discussion if needed, but the students are running their own show. Each group has their own assigned scenario to rationalize to the class. The groups are then tested by their peers and ideas are shared on different thought processes at achieving the same, or different, answers.

  1. Evaluation

This is not the first time I have implemented this activity in the classroom, but it is the first time I’ve done this with an open discussion. I normally lead the discussion, but I tried an open discussion that I read about in Chapter 13 of Vacca&Vacca. I felt that this assignment went the best that it has ever gone. My two classes of marketing really enjoyed this discussion and told me they felt comfortable with the information.

The discussion seemed to teeter on the brink of chaos for just a few seconds and I had to refocus my fourth period. This period is the loudest of all my classes and I expected this to happen. After I refocused the conversation to stay on topic, I did not have any trouble. All of my classes love to talk, even if it is about the material. They enjoy having their opinions heard and showing others that they understand material. I will make sure to keep the conversation more focused in the future, but some great ideas also came when I let the class go on a little bit of a tangent. My third period drifted from business ownership a little bit and got into a great discussion about an advertising campaign for cookies. While this was off topic, they were still within the curriculum and generating great ideas!

I did not believe that this assignment would take the entire period, but I underestimated. I had to pass out the candy as the students left the room because they kept talking about how Famous Amos should have kept his business ownership small to keep more of the profits and hire an outside company to do all the financial work. The students quickly researched what happened to Wally Amos and discovered some controversy over the buy-out deal that he took. I was very excited to see an involved class at this point.

In the future I will change the pace and order in which we read and review the scenarios. I think it would be helpful if I let them read through all of the scenarios then met back as a group instead of reading and talking between each scenario. This created an opportunity for off-task behavior and I can eliminate this by changing the order in which I present the task.

References

Vacca, J., & Vacca, R. (2008). Content area reading: Literacy and learning across the curriculum (9th ed). Boston: Pearson.

EconEdLink. Business Ownership: How Sweet It Can Be!. Retrieved September 18, 2007 from