Sunday, April 5, 2009

Negotiating

Well, sorry for my long departure from blogging. I'd make excuses and whatnot if I felt it was necessary, but instead I'll just ask you to look for more details to come in my next newsletter. In the meantime, I want to mention something that we did in class just the other day.

I did something I hadn't done in a while - I created something new! Most of the time when I've been using materials for class, it's been a modification of something that I or someone else had already made. But just recently I decided to use my own creativity to do something. Rick and I have been making a lot of changes to our general routine in class this semester. And through that process, we have begun to try to ask the question - what is it that our students really need to prepare them for the journey ahead? Well, 2 things we identified were negotiation skills and long range planning.

In response to this, I used that noggin' o' mine that God so generously gave me, and made a game to test the students on both of these skills. I called it (quite simply) The Negotiation Game. The object of the game was for students to engage in trading with other students over a limited selection of raw materials. If a student collected enough materials, he or she could create a product that was more valuable than the materials themselves. And the idea was to try to make as much profit by the end of the game as possible.

The reason the game was so good was that the students really had to stop and think about their strategies. What would be the most effective way to make money in this situation? As it turned out, the students who made the most profits were not those students who created products - it was the students who traded raw materials the whole game. Many students had tunnel vision during the game - they decided which product(s) they wanted to create, and then they went on a buying spree to obtain all the raw materials they needed, paying little attention to how much they spent on each trade. Needless to say, they lost part of their profits on every trade they made.

However, the clever students realized that to make a product, you would have to lose some profits on each purchase of raw materials. But to sell raw materials meant making profits on every sale. And selling raw materials at the beginning of the game resulted in small profits, but selling them towards the end of the game, when materials were scarce, meant big profits. Rick and I were proud to see that several students made profits in excess of 25%! And they were justly rewarded - with candy!

Also, it was a great game because the students just enjoyed it. It looked like a tiny Chinese Wall Street. Ha. They were going crazy trying to purchase all their goods for the best prices. It was really a lot of fun watching the whole thing unfold.

So, sometimes being a teacher, trying to come up with creative ideas for the students, is really a pain in the neck. And this project wasn't without its painful moments, too. But, in the end, seeing the thing work out so successfully was just a great joy. I wish some of you could have been there to see it!

Any news from back home???

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