by Jennifer Fleming

Created on: October 19, 2009

Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself. ~ John Dewey

Today's business students need more than just simple keyboarding, word processing and basic software skills to become valuable future employees. They need to learn how to communicate effectively, the importance of thinking critically and the value of workplace ethics. My goals as a business teacher include equipping students with critical thinking skills through the study of ethics, and learning to communicate by practicing writing and public speaking frequently. When creating lessons, I strive to keep Bloom's Taxonomy in mind. If students are never challenged beyond Bloom's knowledge and comprehension levels, they will never learn to think critically. Other factors that I consider when developing lessons and activities are learning styles, student reading level, and the presence of special student populations. Anytime learning goals are met, students achieve success. Some students have difficulty achieving even minor success whereas others are always high performers. I have found that if a student can achieve the initial learning goal, success will breed success, and future goals will be met as well.

Writing is an essential part of my teaching. In 2004, I attended the National Writing Project at the University of Central Arkansas. The writing project proved to be an exceptional professional development opportunity that shed light on my own writing, taught me how to implement daily writing into my classes and how to make my students better writers. My experience at the institute prompted me to introduce daily writing prompts, weekly article reviews and add writing components to existing lessons. My students read about current business and technology trends, wrote about these trends and discussed them at length. My student's writing abilities improved significantly over the next two years. These improvements showed in their writing prompts and article reviews as well as daily assignments.

Although writing is a central mechanism in communication, oral communication is important as well. Depending on the course, my students generally have at least one assignment in which they will work in teams. Oral presentations are typically one component of team assignments. In my computer business applications class, students are tasked with creating a cereal campaign as a capstone lesson. With this lesson they apply all of the technology taught

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