Aims
“Business Management: the basics” is defined by law from the 7/7/2007 published in the official gazette from the 24/7/2007 and covers a program that must be taught in a minimum of a 120 hours module.
This course offered by FREE has many goals:
- Giving the teachers complete and official support in situations where students act as business managers of a small company (eg: garage, beauty shop, restaurant) being officially recognized by the French Community Agreement Commission and therefore certifying this pedagogical tools to be fully compliant to the teachers frame of reference in terms of skills.
- Making the students proactive about their learning in a concrete context close to their business sector.
- Bringing more practical support to the teachers, as most teachers do not have real experience as a business manager, and a consequence lack concrete references to energize their teaching and make the students co-actors of their learning.
- Making the students more enthusiastic in learning business management in the business sector for which they study for.
- Giving the students more interest in creating their own company, after their studies or after a few years experience, because of the proactive approach and purpose of the course.
- Creating a new type of relationship between students and teachers. The teacher becomes the learning “facilitator”, acting as a banker, a supplier, an administratoretc
Approach and tools
In contrast to the classical pedagogy (that concentrates more on the process of creating a company) students have to manage the daily business of an existing small company. We came to the conclusion that when a learning starts with the legal process to create a company most of the students simply forget it, and moreover they were discouraged for the rest of the course. We thereby preferred to start with the real life and give them a more meaningful and pleasant learning experience. These two aspects have been identified by FREE during its pedagogical surveys as very good entrepreneurial spirit development tools for the students.
The course is made of two types of framework within one structure (please refer to the table below)
- Sequences: Students have to deal with concrete situations. Sequences follow each other in a logical order (eg invitation to tender, specifications, order…), moving on to accounting, and results analysis; only at that moment the course do students have to decide whether to open the company to other members or not. This gradually prepares the student to create their own business plan which is presented at the end of the programme.
- Worksheets describe theoretical notions and training exercises or, depending on the assignment, propose some research leads. Worksheets are developed to allow students to work autonomously at their own pace. However, from our experience it seems the progressive learning is the most efficient.
Each sequence is about a specific theme and can require previously learnt skills. Proposed tasks are partly specific to each theme, but can also be an application of any previous task.
Sequences are built on a type structure :
1. Competences of KNOWLEDGE and THE KNOW-HOW – Refers to the legal programme
2. Tasks to be done.
3. I go into details, I am curious.
4. I retain.
5. I practice at home
6. Self-rating
7. My advisor rates me.
8. I draw conclusions based on the two ratings
9. Appendix.
In the teacher version, we provide pedagogical notes with much advice on how to put a sequence in place, equipment that might be required, the best timescale etc. For some sequences we recommend, for example, to let the students work in a group. However the required documents must be prepared by each student individually. When possible, we suggest interdisciplinary support(eg: business mail can be checked by the French teacher) and to ask external people to help (for example when the topic is about insurance). In addition, we recommend that a lot of importance is placed on self-discipline and ratings (self-rating, teachers ratings,
and also external help), to encourage the business management state of mind more than the accounting techniques (the latter are usually handled by a specialist in a real situation).
Advantages
We have identified many advantages:
- Students are more motivated because they participate and have to make decisions, use business documents, and search for information, because they care about the sector in which the company they have to mange belongs to. They can discuss issues together with full knowledge of the facts.
- Teachers save time in preparing the course (instead of seeing each teacher working alone) and because of the up to date content of the programme they can spend more time being proactive with their students.
- It brings a more accurate and realistic image of the professional world to the teachers (business people, banks, insurance etc).
- The teaching aids are flexible and can be adapted to many different business sectors, depending on the specific teacher’s needs.
- The Teacher-Student relationship is friendlier and people can work together more effectively. The teacher doesn’t have an exclusive control on knowledge; the knowledge and know-how are built by everybody, as are social skills.
- The pedagogical method puts in place four important principles from the “entrepreneurial pedagogy”: Empowering learning, Experience based learning, collaborative learning (teaching others and learning from others), and reflexive learning.
- Different kinds of help are proposed (free of charge); for example professional business management software, proposed with the training with information about how to use it. This is as the result of a partnership between FREE and a provider, and the software might otherwise be very hard for a teacher to obtain. Working with corporate software brings much a more accurate vision to the tools available on the market, instead of working with the usual student software version used in schools most of the time.
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