Reading

I’ve been doing some serious reading of late.  It’s one of the joys  that I have, and a past-time that I wish I engaged in more often.

The book that has captivated me is the Marketer’s Toolkit: The 10 Strategies You Need to Succeed, within the Harvard Business Essentials series.

It’s been utterly fascinating.

As someone who has been involved in the study and practise of high school teaching, it’s a massive difference.  Teaching high school students, to some extent, probably has more in common with sales than with marketing.

And yet, there seems so much that I’m able to latch on to.  Creating a plan, doing research, customising it to the target audience, understanding other things that the target audience has to do, developing new ways of getting a product across to audiences previously unreached, even interactive marketing.

It’s fascinating to me to see how many parallels there are, on a big-picture view, between teaching high school students and marketing products to consumers.

This can help us as educators.  ‘How can our students learn best’ is so often seen in terms of new technology or learning styles (visual-auditory-kinesthetic and the like), but perhaps the best answer is ‘enthusiastically’, with the leading question being ‘how to make them enthusiastic about this?’.  Maybe this is where us teachers need to do our jobs better, by considering our students.