New Year’s Bazaar- developing entrepreneurial skills

Organisation piloting the Good Practice

High school of Economics “Mirko Vešović” Podgorica

Country

Montenegro

Description of the good practice

Each year in December, our school organises The New Year’s Bazaar , as a cross-curricula activity between teaching Entrepreneurs’ Club and Second Foreign Language ( French, Italian and Russian). With teachers, students prepared food and different items to create gifts and sold them in the school to other students,  teachers and parents.

Background

The main idea of the Bazaar is to practically show students the basics of entrepreneurship with every stage of the business plan ( from the conception to its implementation). It is usually done in collaboration with teachers of the second foreign language since the food of those countries is often eaten in our country as well. Of course, there were Montenegrin dishes, as well. Students decided on items, what would be sold, procured the materials and tools, created the items, displayed them, did the advertising, sold them and were constantly guided and mentored by their teachers. Due to the fact that the only constant in the world is change, students also organised an activity called The Advent Calendar( boxes with numbers containing wrapped gifts for sale).

Steps to take if you want to implement the good practice from planning to execution and evaluation if included

1. Planning

  • Defining of the goals: to involve students into implementation of their theoretical knowledge acquired during regular lessons, to develop students collaborative skills, to give students support for their ideas
  • Preparation material for the items: cookies and savoury dishes ( food items), gifts for the Advent calendar ( fabrics, pencils, jewellery, decorative bags, beads, ribbons, glue, etc)
  • Planning  the activity : organising logistics (  setting the date, advertising, providing the selling stalls, etc) 

2. Execution

  • Cooking of the food items, creating gifts for the calendar, setting the selling stalls and selling the items 
  • Guide students through the activity and monitoring the progress
  • Foster collaboration and creativity as students work together

3. Evaluation

  • Collecting feedback from students on what they learnt and managed to complete according to the plan  
  • Evaluation of the students’ engagement and their results 
  • Reflection  on  and keeping records the effectiveness of this activity for future use in various situations and different purposes

Target group/s of the practice

Students in High school of Economics “Mirko Vešović” Podgorica, Montenegro

Number of students involved

40 students in total, 4 SEN students

Benefits, impact on the students and learning outcomes

Benefits, impact on the students and learning outcomes

Students were really motivated and engaged to participate and accomplish the planned activities. Since this is a typical entrepreneurial activity , the benefits they saw were quite obvious: how the process from a business idea to its implementation and final goal ( making profit) functions. Also, there was space for students to be creative and implement certain skills they find useful (cooking, digital marketing, crafting the presents, decoration of the venue, etc). Furthermore,  collaboration between students was at a high level. They learnt from each other. The main impact is that each year  , a large number of students get involved, sometimes even the same ones, and thus, there , in a way , a network of students helping students is created, which contributes to the feeling of belonging to their students’ community. Students’ parliament in our school is doing a huge number of activities of various types , trying to involve as many students as possible, not only for charity reasons, but initially for the reasons of building the students community and providing the students with the opportunity to participate and therefore make decisions for their own benefit. 

Watch the video of the results here

Suggestions for future users of this good practice

This idea could be used originally or adapted to different teaching environments. It does require a lot of effort from teachers from the beginning until the end and also it is time-consuming for the first timers. With time , it becomes easier to allocate the tasks to students according to their personal interests, motivation and skills. Overall, it is a great activity to include a larger number of students and make every student involved . And always it is great fun because parallelly , the Secret Santa activity was organised at school by Students’ Parliament , so many of them bought presents for their secret friends. Teachers also bought a lot of cookies.

Other languages

Albania – Bosnia and Herzegovina – Kosovo – Montenegro

Gallery