Examiner reports have just been published on the exam board sites for this year's exams. I thought I might look into the ways that these useful documents could be used to help our business students and if they could be useful to reflect on our teaching methods. This is not an in-depth investigation but just a few ideas in a quick blog post. What do examiner reports give us? · Sample answers · Common mistakes to avoid · Where are marks being lost ·

Many students are not sure what to put for MOPS in the 20 mark questions on the Edexcel A level business papers. This blog is not exhaustive, it is just some ideas to get you started, or to polish what you already know. I normally teach MOPS as a mindmap exercise as a class and get students to work individually to relate this to a case study company they know well. MOPS stands for: Market, Objective, Product and Situation. There are lots of examples in the Edexcel past paper

This blog is about linking existing information to new information or transfer of knowledge to new contexts to give it a fancier title. Stick with me (I know it sounds dry), but this might help your students to improve their application marks and to give you some ideas for questioning in class… The definition of cognitive is that it relates to conscious intellectual activity such as thinking, reasoning and remembering. Transference is a cognitive process. It means that your s

Reviewing what has been learnt in the lesson is not a new idea. I hope here to give you some quick ideas for plenaries that work, tried-and-tested ideas from business lessons. These can be adapted for any board and any level. The best tip of all is to do the plenary some 10 minutes before the end and not when everyone is loading folders into bags and packing up to leave. Good lessons start with good timing, keep one eye on the time, even if you have to set a timer on the bo

The most successful and engaging starters have two halves, the part you put on the board with instructions and the second part is what you do after. With a bit of practice, you will get this down to a fine art. Ask a question on the board, then get the answer from the students, and there are lots of ways you can do this. Here are just 10 suggestions (well done if you read them all!): 1. Line all students up in a "line of opinion". How do they feel about a topic? This usually

Here are a few ideas of ways to start your Year 12 business lessons so you all get off on the right foot together (or as I used to say to my students you were all in a boat together and I was the one with the map but we all had oars). The A level moves so much faster than the GCSE and there is so much to cover, it's good practice to try and get students into good habits of mind right from the start... 1. Maximise usage of their mobile phone Have a discussion of how they use o

When considering revision and how best to teach it, it seems to split nicely into 3 categories; Time Management, Techniques and Testing yourself. Here are my favourite methods picked up over 22 years of teaching business, law, accounting and computer science. 1 TIME MANAGEMENT As a teacher, it struck me how students struggled to manage the time they had to complete revision tasks every year. Procrastination and distractions make it hard for them to achieve their objectives. M

So on Facebook and Twitter I have been seeing posts with requests for ideas for enterprise day, so I thought I would share a few of mine, in the hope that I might inspire someone. 1) Ideas for ks3 and ks4 I have run this, over the years, with year 7s, 8,s 9s and 10s and it just needs a few tweaks to go from being suitable for ks3 to ks4. For ks5 I do something different which is below. Before the day Students will be put into random groups to mix them up a bit, they will me

Over the years of teaching, I have chatted with colleagues and developed a few planning tips that you might find useful. Here are a few to get you started.... 1) Easy email tips Create subfolders in your home and work emails. E.g. meetings, from students, about students, enterprise and so on for work. For home also create subfolders for; things you have bought, any big projects, emails from your kid's schools and so on. Create rules for people that email you a lot, in outlo

Tip 1: The 3 and 3 method 3 Positive and 3 negative points on each topic. Simplicity will make it easier for your brain to store information. For example, take the topic CSR, advantages and disadvantages: + Differentiation or USP + Reputation + Attract ethical investors -Cost -Profit cost trade-off - impact on shareholder's dividends -Do customers care about ethics or do they just want cheap goods? But that's not all. For those that like a table why not make some of these on

I was teaching BCG / Boston Box theory and I started chatting to my students about walking around a clothes shop. I wanted to link the Boston Box to the Product Lifecycle theory and add a possible context. The question marks could be items that had just arrived on the delivery, ready for the launch phase of their lifecycle (nice theory link) and ready for customers to either snap them up or leave them on the shelf. It then occurred to me that I needed to nip into town and ta

I was marking some lower sixth essays this week and wondering if there is a new way to approach the old dilemma of how to persuade students to stay in context and keep their arguments applied to the case study material. Here are a few of the methods I have tried over the years: 1. I tried....Get out of my pub! I have banned words and phrases which I consider to encourage generic writing. So banned are; the business, they, their, them, the product, he and she are also barred f

Guest blogger Steph Walker gives her unique spin on the classic segmentation lesson. If you are looking for some fresh ideas you are in the right place! Often, the most memorable lessons for pupils are those that have involved a problem-solving element. So how could I introduce the topic of market segmentation in an engaging and memorable way? Like many of us, I have used a chocolate orange to illustrate how the market segments and the chocolate is always a winner with pupils

I was reading the BBC News site this week, trawling for interesting articles that might work as back to school / welcome back project for my sixth formers and I came across an article from and entrepreneur who talked about "falling in love with the problem". He was talking about a business selling safety gear, but it did make me think about a problem I have in class and as a business examiner. The problem - why don't students use the case study in their answer? Every year I

This week I had to give some taster lessons to students who don’t currently take business but might be interested in studying it. I had a few sessions of 35 minutes each and large groups of students. 1. Research I asked around the staff room to find out what other subjects were doing, to avoid a clash and to see if it might give me some ideas. The good folk of the Physics department were knocking monkeys out of trees (I didn’t really understand what that was about), and the

Introduction: Lots of business teachers and students have been asking (via Twitter) how the job / batch / flow biscuit lesson runs so here are the main “ingredients” of that lesson plan. You can put your own spin on it, go on take a responsible risk! Ingredients: Disposable table cloths, disposable gloves (check latex allergies) McVities Rich tea, cheaper biscuits just won’t hold up to the production processes and you will have too many quality control issues, don’t be temp