Krajewski PODCAST

The podcast discusses the misconception that profit equates to business success in business studies. It emphasizes the importance of challenging and correcting this misconception in teaching. The podcast explains the difference between profit and cash flow and the need for both for a sustainable business. Strategies to address the misconception include confirming its presence, developing a teaching strategy, and using inquiry-based learning with simulated budgets. The use of ICT is also highlighted to support students' understanding. The podcast concludes with a discussion on the importance of time management in the classroom and the challenge of addressing students' vocabulary limitations. Welcome to a podcast by Darren Krajewski regarding the teach-through for a misconception in business studies at senior secondary school. As discussed by Larkin, a definition for a misconception is wide-sweeping and can include a student's knowledge, ideas, perception or preconceptions and is there for recognition held by a student that will give an incorrect result when applied to their discipline or field of study. This makes it critical to challenge and correct such barriers to learning when teaching. One misconception for business is that profit equates to business success. However, profit and cash flow are not the same and the student's belief in profitability as the leading metric for business success is wrong and it will incorrectly focus them on revenue that may be unpaid or concurrently ignoring costs or drawings. Profit is the financial gain of business operations whereas cash flow specifically monitors money that is flown to or from the business. For a business to be sustainable, the entrepreneur needs both profit and cash flow but it is wrong to treat them as being interchangeable. It is important as a business teacher to confirm the presence of the misconception, develop a strategy to teach through the misconception and to confirm the success of such teaching. A business needs a positive cash flow which means more money flows into the business than is paid out. The misconception of profit as a leading indicator of success comes from personal experience as a student and professional networking as a business owner. The media and other forms of communication often identify that a business is performing well when it is regarded as being profitable. This can be demonstrated through a web search engine using the words profitable startup which in turn lists results linking business success to profitability. This reinforces the idea of cash being only a dollars and cents term. As such the novice business student sees profit as an overall result rather than as an aspect of cash flow. Conversely entrepreneurs can often refer to their profit as an indicator of success through inexperience or to create the appearance of success. This has been observed in professional settings with other business people or when personally discussing previous years of business performance. Strategies to identify the presence of the misconception that profit is more important than cash flow would be through general discussion when teaching ventures from the fundamentals of business to business establishment. This would occur during the introduction of a new topic and provide opportunity to gauge the time required for a teacher lesson to treat the misconception and a logical sequencing to the student for that next lesson. The teaching strategy will demonstrate that profit is a component of cash flow and not interchangeable. This would take advantage of what Savion called belief perseverance. Rather than wrestle with something that may linger beyond the classroom the teacher through will add to the student's knowledge that profit is a component of cash flow. This will develop understanding of the balance sheet's financial relationship with the profit and loss statement. This teaching strategy will use the pedagogical approach of inquiry based learning with simulated budgets that use profit as a part of the overall calculation of cash flow. Such an approach requires the student to use cognitive effort to investigate the information and potentially activate learning that goes beyond the classroom. This is necessary given that misconceptions may have existed for some time and resist the short lived gains of the classroom. This method will be supported by explicit teaching and questioning to establish knowledge before students form groups to collaboratively work together. Use of explicit teaching is to ensure fundamental concepts are discussed with accuracy and to make clear distinctions between main topics such as profit and cash flow. To focus on the misconception of profit the lesson will combine ICT with explicit teaching and practice work so that students are thinking, communicating and responding rather than listening and copying. This will allow the lesson to have regular content changes to keep students active with ICT breaks during explicit teaching to reduce muddy spots and less intuitive constructs. The use of ICT will also allow those with English as an additional language or dialect to access cooperative learning with their peers while using ICT products in their mother tongue. By maximising their understanding of content and keeping pace with their peers the misconception can be successfully targeted and manipulated. They will also have the ICT literacy benefit of English translations for group discussion along with business theory handouts translated into their language and into that of a local Indigenous dialect. Misconception of profit over cash flow is only a significant issue in business while the student is naive to the theory. Given that the misconception can be proven as false through activities that analyse a business and its financial statements the student strengthens their own correct concept of cash flow over profit as they complete activities. A successful misconception teach through will occur during the final activity where students use business data to confirm the condition of business operations. The misconception of profit being the leading metric for business sustainability and growth is wrong but treatable. To engage in their studies students will need to correctly analyse the financial statements of business for a successful result. This creates a channelling of the student's learning towards the realisation of cash flow being the superior indicator of business health. Rather than attack the misconception the strategy is to identify it and build it into the correct model. This will be a simple process of countering a misconception due to knowledge and immaturity. It is expected that hands on data use activities will disprove that profit and cash flow are interchangeable. That concludes the formal part of this podcast, now for a general chat and discussion. Firstly I would like to thank Rusty who is a teacher with me at a school and we are both in the humanities who has helped me in regards to reviewing my lesson plans. Rusty's real name is Avery Van Zyl and he has been quite a supporting character in my transition into the classroom as teaching business and maths. The most interesting thing about feedback from Rusty is that I already knew what he was going to say but I hadn't realised it. And that is time. Time is the most precious thing that you have in the classroom and there are many things competing against it and there are many things that can take time from you during the classroom. And as soon as he looked at my lesson and I gave him the red pen to use and he started to use it, he was basically just cutting everything in half because two 40 minute lessons does not deliver much at all. This is the reality of the classroom. Also with competing issues and ILP requirements now climbing up towards 25% of a classroom, time is a real issue and it does not take many students who have either ILP needs or behaviour management issues to quickly erode from a lesson plan. One of the things I've particularly learned from this process of engaging with Rusty is during my learning for the Masters to become a qualified teacher, I never seem to have found a lesson template or a lesson that says to build in the extra time for time lost during behaviour management or to provide correct ILP or Individual Learner's Plan support. And I'm now getting into the habit as soon as I see how long a lesson is going for, I'm going to automatically probably cut about 20% off and reserve or quarantine that for trying to deal or teach through the issues that come up as I am trying to teach. So I'd like to thank you for that Rusty, having a good open talk with you is really good in regards to helping me through this and identifying what's happening there. When we're given a 40 minute lesson we try and stack it to the brim and we do go over to get everything to fit in and it's just not realistic. The second thing that Rusty and I have talked at length about lately now and particularly with this lesson plan is I'm not too worried about misconceptions I must admit in the end of the day. I'm not having more difficulty or challenges making sure that the students can understand my level of vocabulary. And I'm pretty confident that when I was growing up that we understood, we had a larger vocabulary. For example, when teaching about US currency and talking about how other currencies are pegged to that currency. I have to explain the word pegged. Now it's used the word link instead. This is for year 9's that I'm currently teaching. And I'm starting to develop a theory that there is an echo chamber of only so many words that are continually repeated with teenagers because they're linked so extensively to devices and unless they are actively engaging in reading or other activities their own particular type of jargon and words or common words being used are in that echo chamber. So they've got sort of a digital silo now and it's becoming, I'm finding now I'm spending more time breaking my language down that I need to support bringing concepts in. So bringing that all back and just shooting from the hip on that stuff I guess. I'm factoring in a lot more time for my lessons to make sure that I do have opportunity for those lessons to absorb disruptions or other events that are occurring. So otherwise talking about the misconception itself, it's a common one. I've done it myself in business. I still remember my first years in business and all I used to say to people was gross profit when I knew that wasn't correct and I was deliberately staying within the profit and loss gross profit area because I wanted, I wasn't just trying to convince people I was successful, I was trying to convince myself I was successful. Even when I did use formulas to work out how I was travelling business I knew that I was providing a service way above what I could sustain in order to continue clients. After 2,500 clients I got really tired over the last 10 years and I have, as someone who teaches businesses I've often ignored important aspects of business even though I knew that they were there. Again, thank you Rusty and thank you for the opportunity to reflect on that through a podcast. I think that was quite good and I think I'll leave it there and say good evening. Thank you.