As an adjective ‘prime’ means first in excellence, quality or value, and as a verb it means to make ready, prepare. By making your teaching more:
- Practical
- Realistic
- Inspirational
- Meaningful and
- Engaging
You, the teacher, will give your students a better, more relevant and useful business education and students will start to develop those softer employability skills vital for life.
Practical: This is allowing students to actually do things rather than the teacher just chalking and talking ‘at’ them. For example, a practical lesson allows students to create an invoice, make a sales call or reconcile bank accounts instead of reading about them in a book or being told how to do them. They discover the consequences of their actions and start to understand the business flow. As the saying goes ‘practice makes perfect,’ so for every piece of theory you teach your students, try to think of a way for them to practise the ‘doing’ of it.
Realistic: Making their learning environment close to a real-life situation; what if they used real business tools such as Survey Monkey to perform feedback surveys and created real marketing brochures to promote products? This would be better preparing them for the real world.
Inspirational: Inspire students and give them examples of people who have achieved great success; what if students heard stories of past students that have gone on to succeed, or stories of successful local business people? “Success comes with energy and passion and without a fire in the belly people are unlikely to succeed.” Also, Teachers who are very motivated and passionate about their teaching have an amazing effect on their students and can truly inspire and motivate them to succeed.
Meaningful: Make it relevant for the students and what they are interested in. How much more motivated do you think students would be, knowing the lessons they are completing are relevant to their futures? Make it personal for the students allowing them to try and test their own processes and see what effect it has.
Engaging: Make it interesting and fun for the students (and the teacher); perhaps adding a competitive element to their learning, or adding fun scenarios that get the students involved. Enable students to experiment with their own ideas, empowering them and giving them ownership of them.
Rosie is currently the CEO of Virtual Enterprise Australia (VEA). VEA advocates the PRIME principles for understanding business. By reading From Classroom to Boardroom you will learn how to make your teaching more PRIME.