Teacher Training #1

Yesterday I gave a presentation to my counterpart entrepreneurship teachers.  It went really well!  We covered the material that they’ll be teaching while I’m in the USA and a couple other hard topics.  I broke it down into 4 parts:

My 6 counterpart professor from 4 different schools

Introducing the business plan.  We talked about how a recipe is the cooking version of a business plan.  There’s many steps to make gallo pinto and you need to follow all the steps in order or it won’t turn out well.  Then I made them do a jigsaw puzzle where marketing, costs, production etc. are all interconnected.  One team did it super quickly (and received a prize of peanut M&M’s) while the others struggle mightily.

Ricardo and Alba dominated the puzzle

Presentation of the prototype.  Didn’t spend too much time on this.  All of the students have to present their prototype to the class.  So we made a list of do’s and don’ts of presenting.

Market study.  Defining what a market is in business terms is hard to do in Nicaragua.  So we discussed characteristics of buyers (age, sex, income, profession etc) and how they relate to certain goods and services.

Design of a Market Study.  Since our students struggle with creating good questions for their surveys, I played 20 questions with the teachers.  It was funny how much they struggled because they’ve never played before.  But it was a good exercise and then we discussed the do’s and don’ts of survey making.

Next one scheduled for May 28^th, woohoo!