Six capable advisors with many years of experience have answered questions from new DECA advisors. Click on each question to see their responses. Any questions can be directed to Christopher Young by emailing him at christopher_young@deca.org.

Question 1: What are you using to teach your marketing curriculum—a textbook, LAPs [instructional modules from MarkED: www.Mark-ED.org] or other resource material?

Question 2: How do you keep all this information organized? How do you manage all the paperwork associated with DECA?

Question 3: How do you manage your time between DECA, teaching and other duties? Do you get release time to help coordinate DECA?

Question 4: How do you keep your students motivated and on task?

Question 5: Do you have prerequisites for your classes?

Question 6: How do you incorporate DECA into the classroom when not all students are members? What types of activities?

Question 7: What do you do at your chapter meetings?

Question 8: Do you mostly use class time to prepare for competition or is there additional time for preparation before/after school that students are expected to attend?

Question 9: How can you teach students to complete projects? We can’t get all those chapters covered before it is time to compete.

Question 10: How do you select students for competition? How do you figure out who is going to compete in certain events—without testing each student and spending a lot of time to figure it out?

Question 11: How do you get students in DECA to commit to competition?

Question 12: How do you really get a chapter up and running well? What strategies and activities seem to be generally more successful?

Question 13: How long did it take you to get down to perfection, if perfection is even possible? When do you finally start catching on to everything and it starts to run smoothly?

Question 14: I am having a difficult time getting kids to come to the meetings and follow through with their ideas. I have not tied these activities to a grade, and I wondered what other incentives I could use?

Question 15: Does it help to give extra credit for the projects?

Question 16: What kind of summer planning occurs for a successful DECA year?

Question 17: How can you be a good/effective classroom teacher and a DECA advisor? I can't seem to be able to do both without stressing myself out terribly.

Question 18: How can you use your chapter officers to help the chapter and you as the advisor and also improve themselves?

Question 19: I'm not sure how to incorporate DECA into class as well as make it extra-curricular.

The Round-table Contributors

	Allen Gancarz, recently retired from the East Syracuse-Minoa chapter in New York
	Mike Karpie, advisor at Hamburg Central High School in New York
	Bill Lind, recently retired advisor from Millard South High School in Nebraska. Now state advisor for Nebraska Delta Epsilon Chi
	Lucinda Mason, advisor at Demopolis High School in Alabama
	Dennis Sweetapple, advisor at Spanish River High School in Florida
	Debbie Tixier, advisor at La Cueva High School in New Mexico