Want to integrate DECA Series Competitive Events into your classroom?

Get to know your friends: Instructional Areas

Advisors often ask how DECA integrates with their classrooms. That answer has two main parts: integrating the events with the curriculum and integrating the other chapter activities with the classroom. This article shows the direct way that role-play events relate to your teaching.

The key to integrating DECA’s Series Events into your classroom lies in understanding the instructional areas the events fall under and then the performance indicators listed under them. Instructional areas (IAs) parallel curriculum units (standards). For example, currently the Series Events are written using the Marketing Core IAs and the Business Administration Core IAs (as defined by the Career Cluster concept). The complete list of instructional areas for the Series Events at this time is

Instructional Areas in the Marketing Core

Channel Management (distribution)Marketing-Information Management

Market PlanningPricing

Product/Service ManagementPromotion

Selling

Instructional Areas in the Business Administration Core

(Common to all business specialties)Business Law

CommunicationsCustomer Relations

EconomicsEmotional Intelligence

EntrepreneurshipFinancial AnalysisHuman Resources

Information ManagementMarketing (its role and function)

OperationsProfessional Development

Strategic Management

Whenever advisors teach a unit in one of these common instructional areas, they can extend the concepts by using role-play scenarios. Previously used role-plays may be procured through DECA Images, and there are samples on the Web site: www.deca.org/celisting.html. (When new advisors ask how they should invest their scarce resources, they can’t go wrong with starting their library of previous events and event winners from DECA Images.)

Each Series Event is labeled with a specific instructional area and lists 5 performance indicators (competencies) under that IA. Students can also identify and learn the skills (performance indicators) for that IA through role-play practice. (The complete list of performance indicators, organized under their instructional areas, is found on the DECA Web site.) Specific teaching techniques are suggested in various places on DECA’s Web site and in its publications. (For example, see the teaching tips under the Customized Plan button on the Web site home page.) We are preparing a lesson plan for teachers on how to introduce these events to students, including developing appropriate skills.

Studying comprehensive exam questions is another way of integrating Series Role-play Events into the classroom. Advisors may procure previous exams and select questions that relate to the unit they are teaching. They can then use these questions, and vocabulary from these questions, in a variety of creative ways for each curriculum unit they teach. Just go through the previously used questions and label them according to which instructional unit they relate to. Then you can quickly pull out a few to liven up your class sessions: vocabulary, contests, a “Who can explain the wrong answer?” activity (the answer keys do explain the wrong answers)—wherever your creativity leads you!