INTRODUCING BUSINESS EDUCATION IN EARLY MIDDLE SCHOOL – MATH PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This paper presents briefly the authors’ experience in stating educational goals, developing didactics and organizing elements of early business education. St. George Private Secondary School, Sofia, Bulgaria, educates mainly students who are potential managers and leaders in various areas of the industry and social life. The school plan for the 8^th grade contains a course in management where the concepts of business are introduced from a qualitative and descriptive perspective. However, there are a lot of topics related to business education in mathematics curricula for the 6^th and 7^th grade. The methods we apply are of three types: problem solving as a manager activity, project design from the perspective of business practice, and giving idea about optimization. The problem-solving approach allows students to operationalise some concepts via putting business strategies into practice. We modified the Polya’s 4-step problem-solving plan to a 5-point check-list which could serve as a general management strategy. In order to help students to learn in meaningful ways we incorporate project-oriented initiatives connected with the relevance of an interest-based curriculum. Parallel to the particular subject objectives the project-oriented initiatives provide opportunities for multipurpose integrated consideration of topics. The integrated approach we apply encourages the future managers to take decisions in various situations: content interpretation, implementation of IT, layout design, etc. Any project-oriented initiative is planned to form a kind of knowledge and skills that synthesize the analytical knowledge and skills developed in particular subjects. Central role in this practice plays the mathematics teaching-learning process performed in Socratic style. The incorporation of new teaching methods has been done with respect to the TRIZ theory.