Things you need to consider before you get your students.
The planning for your VE year should start well before you get your students. Several things need to be in place to reduce the stress and make the experience a smooth journey for you as you move with your students into the foundations of the company and the competitive season. For me, with many years of experience, I had a plan in place and a mental pacing guide in my head so I knew where I was going and what needed to be done. But for new or inexperienced teachers, this is impossible as it will be a “fog bank” that you venture into and are unsure of what is ahead or even if you are going in the right direction. This post is to help you prepare to enter the fog of the coming year with a plan and some sort of idea of where you need to go.
PLANNING YOUR COMPANY STRUCTURE
The first thing you need to have in place is an idea of the company structure you plan to implement in your class. This will largely depend on the number of students you have enrolled in the class. I have developed a Company Structure and Staffing guide that you can review to prepare for the coming year. If you know how many students you will have enrolled in your class, you can start thinking about how you want to structure the office environment when the students are ready to start applying for jobs. But as you all know, the kids you get on the first day can change during the first two weeks of school. With this said, you should have at least a good idea of the type of company structure you want before the students arrive, and you need to be flexible if those numbers change. You should read my Company Structure blog post from my website to get an idea of how I structured my classes and how that changed as I became more experienced with teaching the class.
GRADING
This is personal to every teacher across the spectrum teaching a VE class. I think knowing how you will grade the students well before they arrive is really important. The VE classroom is a very different animal than the traditional classes you might have taught. In a traditional class, everyone works on the same assignments and moves together through the curriculum. The VE classroom is not like that. Once the company is formed, students will work in different departments and do completely different things in your classroom simultaneously. So, planning how you will grade the students going into the experience is important. Teachers who wait until the end of the first grading period without a plan will be under a lot of stress to come up with a grading process at the last minute, and this can lead to conflicts with students who question the grading process if they do not have it ahead of time. I recommend developing transparent, objective guidelines for how you plan to grade the students so they can be front-loaded with these guidelines and know exactly how they will be evaluated and accessed in this unique classroom environment. I would highly recommend reading my blog post “Making the Grade”. This will give you some insight into how my grading process evolved and how I handled grading in this unique environment. You must remember there is no right or wrong way to grade, but whatever you plan to do, you must be consistent and clear to the students in your class. This resource is found in the Orientation Task 1: Introduction to Virtual Enterprises in the HUB curriculum. You can download the Expectations and Requirements ( Word doc) and edit it to align with how you plan to grade the class.
MENTORS
The ability to recruit mentors is one of the key elements to becoming a successful and competitive program. Mentors can act as coaches for competitive teams and classroom volunteers to work with specific departments, or they can even provide support remotely by reviewing student-created work to ensure it is as professional as possible. As a new teacher, this can be a very challenging component for a new program as new teachers do not have the experience or knowledge of what will be happening in the classroom and have difficulty articulating what they need from mentors. With this situation, it is important to tap into your administration, school community liaisons, CTE director, and local Chamber of Commerce or Rotary chapters to recruit mentors. Each mentor can reduce new teachers' burden, and the mentors can share the responsibility of working with students in their areas of expertise. They do not need to come in every day, once a week, every two weeks, or even monthly to help you and your students. They will be needed mostly in the early months of the company, and the responsibility will diminish as the year swings into the winter and spring months.
TRADE SHOWS, CONFERENCES and TRAVEL PLANNING
One of the things that makes VE unique is the ability to compete to travel and attend competitive events like trade shows and conferences. I highly recommend attending these events where your students see their work in action and the simulation becomes real. Depending on your desire to bring your students into the competitive arena, looking into the funding and your ability to travel to state or regional competitions with them is important. Depending on where you live, that could be a simple bus ride or it could involve an extended field trip where students miss one or more days of school. These events can cost students and the school money for registration and travel. So, it is important to research your school district's funding support of the program and the processes needed to attend these events and have your students get the most impactful VE experience. Usually, it is best to look into the yearly calendar and submit requests for the extra-curricular events you would like your student to participate in. Having a plan in place can allow you to have materials and presentations ready for back-to-school night, where you can share the plans with parents at the beginning of the year. Also, having a plan for the year and knowing the level of financial support you will receive will allow you and your students to plan fundraising events to help them supplement the costs of attending these events.
ONBOARDING STUDENTS
When students enter your class on the first day of school, you should have several things in place to help ensure a smooth onboarding process. (1) first, you will need to set up the sections in the VE curriculum and load the students into the class. This is done in the HUB under the Teacher Admin. You should set up the sections first and then add students to the section. If students add classes later, you can add them as they enter your class. (2) The second thing is that you should have a list of the login information for your students with user names and passwords so they can log into the HUB and access the orientation materials found in the VE HUB. It is important to keep this throughout the year as student will forget their passwords and login usernames. With this, I took it upon myself to set up their accounts with the student ID number as their password. This takes a little extra time at the beginning of the year because you need to log into their account and change the password manually. I found this worked best for me and my students in the long run. (3) Third, have a syllabus with expectations for students in the class. This should include how they will be graded and expectations for work and participation in company-related activities. This resource is found in the Orientation Task 1: Introduction to Virtual Enterprises in the HUB curriculum. You can download this Word doc and edit it to align with how you plan to run the class. (4) Lastly, if you are planning to take students to events throughout the year, it would be important to have a calendar in advance so they can plan as most of our students have busy lives, with extracurricular activities, practice and sports competitions and family responsibilities outside of school.
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