Day 1:
Day 1 of the Ethics lesson introduces the students to concepts of ethics—real-world ethical scenarios that they might run into in the business world. The activity is a small group activity. They read a small scenario card in their group and it tells a story about something that could happen where there’s an ethical dilemma, and then the group has to decide between them how they would approach that dilemma–what decision would they make to try to take a very careful ethical path, or maybe when they would try to bend the rules a little bit. And then, the students report out, which gives them an oral presentation experience; they report out what they decided, which puts them in the spotlight with an audience consisting of the rest of the class.

We began Day 1 with a review of what we had done in the previous two days. I had prepared a supplementary lesson based on a book by Joel Baken called The Corporation, which discusses some of the possible problems and challenges, ethical situations, in the corporate world. And so, we use that supplementary material to get ourselves ready for the Principles of Finance lesson in Ethics.

We started with vocabulary. This lesson has a good connection to writing skills because the culminating piece is a written assignment, and we begin with vocabulary about ethics—social responsibility, discrimination, even child labor—the different kinds of situations that they might not have been familiar with as vocabulary before. Then we moved from that introductory presentation by me as the teacher into the small groups, and the students considered those concepts as they looked at the ethical scenarios that we presented them with from Teacher Resource 13.1: Ethical Issue Scenarios. They worked in the small groups for 10 or 15 minutes, and then at the end of the class we asked them to stand up and present. One student had been chosen as a reporter. The other students stood up to support them and they reported what they thought about their situation to the rest of the class.