In teacher Debbie Nolan’s marketing fundamentals class, students are working on creating a coffee shop business. This is a collaborative assignment that allows students to be creative with their ideas.

“As teachers, we want to give our students many ways to learn the material and to be able to assess their learning in small and big ways, so this gives me that opportunity to understand whether they know it or not in a way that is not a test,” Nolan said. “We are learning about SWOT analysis. It’s an acronym for strength, weaknesses, opportunity, and threats.”

This project is designed to help students like sophomore Anna Mai learn the strengths, weaknesses, opportunity, and threats of having a business. It’s a way of applying what they learned about being able to market to an actual business.

“I liked that I was able to learn not only the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a coffee shop, but I can also apply this same information to a future business of mine,” Mai said. “We liked that it was very informative and that we were allowed to be very free while working on the project.”

Nolan’s goal is to make sure students are effectively learning the information so that it can be a help to them as they continue their marketing journey.

“When we are learning in class I like the students to read and take notes, then I review the notes with them but then I want to take it a step further along the way. We want to do small and larger assignments that use the material so they can really understand it,” Nolan said.

This not only helps the students understand what they have learned over the past couple of weeks by using kinesthetic learning, but it also helps them discover their passion for business and helps them start their career early.

“What I liked about marketing was that it actually applies to real life and the job that I plan on going into will deal with marketing as well,” junior Gabe Baxter said.