Mount Union College’s department of economics, accounting and business administration is helping to bring business concepts to life at St. Thomas Aquinas High School as part of a four-lesson in-class project titled “Bringing Business and Economics Issues to your Classroom.”
The exercises are geared toward college-bound juniors and seniors to help develop problem-solving skills and teamwork abilities.
Ray Posey
“As a department we asked ourselves if there are things that would be of interest to college prep high school students,” said Ray Posey, associate professor, executive in residence accounting, economics and business administration at the College. “We thought this is a way to help prepare students that may have an interest in business as well as an outreach to high schools to get them interested in Mount Union.”
The project is broken into four different in-class exercises introducing new interactive methods of teaching business concepts. Each lesson is presented and taught by different faculty members from Mount Union. The exercises include game theory, celebrity marketing, teambuilding experience and raising awareness of world poverty and inequality.
On Tuesday, May 10, the lesson was the “Teambuilding Experience” presented by Posey and Sandra Ekstrand, assistant professor of economics, accounting and business administration at the College.
The class was divided into five teams. Two teams were designated “command and control” groups where a leader is in control. The members of the remaining teams had equal control and were asked to function cooperatively. The objective was to duplicate a tinker toy structure that was shielded from the class in 20 minutes. Only the leaders of the “command and control” teams were allowed to view the structure while each member of the remaining groups was allowed to view the structure individually.
Sandra Ekstrand
“The difficult task for the leaders is to be able to communicate and convey the instructions in a way the team members understand, and it is difficult when students disengage or become renegade team members,” said Ekstrand.
As a result, the teams without a leader that worked cooperatively finished the task first.
It was also apparent that groups with leaders were less motivated and were more reluctant to participate. The opposite could be said of the other groups as all members shared a common vision of the task and were more motivated to complete the task and participate.
“What we saw today is the old style management is slower,” said Posey. “It’s the ability of the people to work together that makes it work. The power of groups to figure it out and make it work is really the difficult task managers have today. Being able to learn and figure out how to use and organize a work force around teams, allowing employees to have more information and draw upon the skills and talents of the workers, is what organizations are moving to.”
These sessions provide an opportunity for students to better develop problem-solving skills and teamwork abilities through real-world situations demonstrated through each exercise.
“Students do not want to be lectured to all the time, and this presented an opportunity for hands-on work that can motivate the students to participate and learn,” said Stacey Dougherty, business teacher at St. Thomas Aquinas. “This was a good opportunity for the students to be introduced to new concepts, develop problem solving and thinking skills, while learning from Mount Union faculty members.”
For more information on the “Bringing Business and Economic Issues to Your Classroom,” contact Pat Matthews, professor of economics, accounting, and business administration, at Mount Union by calling (330) 823-3275 or emailing matthepc@muc.edu.