Mixing it up with a "No Exercise Book lesson"

By C. Malone, Teacher of Business Studies, ICT and Computing and Head of Phoenix House

 

Sometimes, teaching certain topics needs you to think outside the box. In the new GCSE Business specification, one of the first topics on the course is “Business Planning Documents”, and as you can imagine, it isn’t the most exciting topic to teach Year 9 on a Friday afternoon!

With this, I decided to teach an active lesson to engage the students whilst letting them be mobile around the room.  In the previous lessons, our current student teacher had covered the content of the Business plan; six key areas that the students need to know is included in this key document for businesses.

                  

 

Firstly, the students were handed a board marker as they entered the room and told that we wouldn’t be using our exercise books today. I then positioned myself at the back of the room. Their first task was to write everything that they knew about how businesses plan and so to teach me what they already knew!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to their seats, we then went through their “teaching” of me and we highlighted that, although there were lots of good responses, that for our knowledge in the examination questions, some key information was missing from the board. So, the next task required the students to review the six key areas of business planning, choose one, and cover their desk with the full content they would need to know!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once this was done, the students then went to their PC’s to move on to another task. Using their peers work on the desks behind them, they then had to create a revision sheet for their book. This continued the theme of the lesson, allowing the students to move around their room.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of the lesson, the students had used their peers notes to create a revision sheet for this topic, which was  then stuck in their books.

 

To end the lesson, we had a physical plenary where we moved around the room to vote which of the six areas of a business plan the students thought were most important!

A very busy lesson!