International Business Economics

In Executive MBA program students must balance full time job, social life, and all the graduate courses simultaneously for the duration of the entire program. For that equilibrium, educators in management development program are researching and applying new methodologies. Storyboarding is one of the strategies students apply, another strategy is mandatory development of lessons, which is made by students in order to reflect and exercise on the material. One of the most frequently used pedagogical techniques is case teaching. A powerful tool for case teaching is Mind Mapping, it is extremely effective for sharpening the thinking and learning process. Mind mapping is a revolutionary system for capturing ideas and insights. It can be used nearly in every activity, where thought, creativity, planning, and recall are involved. Visual note taking has existed for centuries, beginning with primitive man, ending with Michelangelo and Da Vinci. A mind map allows the user to record a lot of information and to show the relationship between concepts and ideas. This technique was developed by Buzan in 1970, after reviewing research on psychology of learning and remembering. The mind map has four basic characteristics: the subject attention is crystallized in a central image, the main themes of the subject radiate from the central image as branches, branches comprise a key image or key word and the branches are connected in nodal structure. Left and right brain thinking. In most people, the left cortex is concerned with academic activities. The right cortex deals with rhythm, images and imagination, color, daydreaming, face recognition, and pattern or map recognition. How students learn how to develop mind maps? Students are taught all the theory and after that are given to work on case studies. Another way is to give the information to students, some days before the class and to tell them all the requirements. Applications of mind mapping. There are several types of mind maps: Descriptive mind maps, Integrative mind maps, Mind maps with case analysis process and Group process analysis. Positive outcomes from the mind mapping process are these ones: you can handle any questions during the presentation, good developing agenda and plans, changes can be quickly made. What do students say about mind mapping? Students are pleased with the power and simplicity of the technique, mind maps also are used for integrating sets of materials. Mind maps offer them ease of studying, open-mindedness and ease of comprehension the information. Mind mapping and metaphorical thinking. Mind mapping introduces the students to efficacy of using metaphors in their thinking process, which are very useful in understanding, interpreting and communicating a complex phenomenon. Also it helps conceptualizing how theories and aproaches in business look. All the executives use mind mapping as a tool for reflection.

Reading is the skill that everyone needs, skill that leads to personal fulfillment and professional success. Reading is one of the most challenging areas in education system because students' understanding regarding the aims of reading also influences their ability to do it. First strategy for improving comprehension is predicting the information, which helps in setting a purpose for reading. This strategy allows more student interaction with the information. It is very important to compare the outcome of the text with initial prediction. Without this part, entire prediction process is meaningless Another strategy is visualizing, that involves the imagination of the reader and requires the reader to construct the image of what is read. That strategy offers a clear image of the section read. Making connections is a strategy, which activates the prior knowledge of the learner and connects the ideas in the text to own experiences. It can be "text-to-text, text-to-self and text-to-world", consequently students can make that type of connections by drawing, thinking how these characters are relatable to their life or to world in general. Summarizing is another method to facilitate a better process of reading, this process requires emphasizing only the most important information from the text and resuming all the information with own words, during that process students find the main points and distinguish the related knowledge Questioning is a strategy which enhances reader's understanding. In this technique student returns to the text throughout the reading process to find the answers on the questions given by the teacher. By this tactic student practice, distinguishing between questions that are factual inferred or based on prior knowledge. Inferring refers to reading between the lines. It drives student to draw their own conclusions, make predictions and seek for the deep meaning of the text. Teachers believe that without a solid foundation of reading strategies the students will struggle throughout their academic and adult life. The researchers want to provide reading awareness to the students by teaching them reading comprehension strategies and by that technique students will have a more meaningful reading experience. Reading proficiency is one of the most fundamental skill for academic learning and success in school, this skill is significantly related to how much a person can achieve in his or her personal life. Research results show that students improve comprehension when they analyze which strategy they are using and how it helps bring meaning to text The results of researches showed that there was a lack of knowledge in the area of reading techniques, however after a comprehensive study, there was an improvement in students' success. The path of perfectioning reading skills is hard, considering that students usually have problems with questioning, inferring and summarizing strategies.