marketing units with impact reflection

One of the best units I ever had a chance to be a part of was a marketing unit. The students came up with ideas to sell at school but had to do all the steps to create a business plan. They did market research in school as well as using data from what people were searching in our area using Google Trends, https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US. The children had to research the cost of materials and compare to what similar items sell for. They also created advertisements using persuasive writing ideas. Then they made their plans for how much they should make and charge at the school market day sale. There were many other great moving parts and tie-ins as well about how money works and converting currency- and overall it was a very authentic transdisciplinary unit that all enjoyed. Most of the students felt very successful and happy with how the day went.

Counting their Market Day Money

We were feeling very successful after all of our hard work. After they counted their money we converted it into local currency so the students took home real cash. However, I had one more challenge for the students to consider for further reflection in the future.

During our wrap up I decided to throw another curveball at them and we watched a video from https://www.storyofstuff.org. Specifically, we watched the video below.

It was interesting to think about what we had viewed as being successful that day and what did they think about that after watching our video? Would they have changed anything about the day? What did they sell? What did they use for advertising? Would they change what they used as packaging if the item they had sold required it? Knowing the idea was going to be touched upon again the following year I thought it was a good seed to plant on what does success looks like for a business and should there be responsibility to do good as part of what makes a business successful.