ToY Finalist Megan Wald

Outside of the Box

Students in Linton taught business with hands-on projects by Teacher of the Year finalist Wald.

By Kelly Hagen, kelly.hagen@ndunited.org

The phrase “business as usual” is meant to describe a state of affairs that is largely unchanged and moored in place. Somewhat ironically, business education is one subject area that is constantly changing, evolving and reinventing itself, year to year.

“It changes every single year,” said Megan Wald, a business education instructor at Linton High School and finalist for 2023 North Dakota Teacher of the Year. “That’s one of the fun parts about my job. … I teach a financial literacy class. So, 15 years ago when I started, we spent a lot of time still talking about writing checks out and managing a checkbook register. And the last three or four years, now we’re talking about using cash apps and things like that. Definitely, the technology improvements have changed.”

Wald also believes that the nature of constant change and evolution in business has helped to move all areas of learning forward. As projectbased learning has become more and more prevalent in education, it was business education that really helped pioneer the practice. “I feel like that’s our other strong point,” Wald said. “Fifteen years ago, we were doing project-based learning. I feel like we’re the innovators of that because our focus is giving students those career-readiness skills that don’t come from a textbook.”

Some of the projects that Wald incorporates into her teaching in Linton include a small business ownership course and a new project that she based on a social media post from a business teacher in Pennsylvania called Collaborative City. “This idea for the Collaborative City starts with individual projects in a few of my courses,” she said. Students in small business ownership create fictitious businesses, determining a product, target market and SWOT analysis, then making a physical building out of a box and adding it to the city, which is a large piece of cardboard kept in Wald’s room. Students in her accounting class will research the “Big Four” accounting firms and add a skyscraper based on one of the firm’s headquarters to the city. Web site design students then create a building to represent business where IT employees would work and have access to customers, roads and parks, which they also make. And students in tech and engineering wired up streetlights.

“At the end of the year, we added additional greenery, park benches and even cars and people to our city,” Wald said. “All students and visitors to my room loved to look over the city and see all of the details and work that our student put into it. … This project is a very ‘outside of the box’ way to learn and capitalize on student interest. I am so excited to see how big it can get!”