The Founder Movie Class Discussion Activity

It’s the week before fall break, so I’m just gonna let movies and AI teach my class this week. I’m a terrible teacher, right? Before you rush to judgment, check out this lesson to see how I leverage a feature film and generative AI to create an engaging multi-day lesson. We’re not just watching a movie and answering questions, we’re applying 10 weeks worth of business class content and exercising writing and critical thinking skills.

Each year, the Principles of Business Management curriculum team at my school shows our classes the 2016 film The Founder. Directed by John Lee Hancock and starring Michael Keaton, the film depicts the story of Ray Kroc’s transformation of MacDonald’s from a small burger and shake stand in California (not Illinois?) to a global empire.

The Film

This is–hands down–the best film to show to a business class. It covers communication, ethics, finance, marketing, law, decision-making, etc. So far this year, my class has had the following units:

1. Economics & decision-making
2. Business ethics
3. Business communication

With only a week before fall break, I decided that, rather than interrupt unit 4 (international business) with a 2-week break, we will use the film to facilitate discussion of all the topics we have covered in the class so far this year.

The Prompt

In past years, we had a worksheet for the film that mostly covered content, then we discussed it afterwards or did a business communication activity. I wanted this time to focus more on the business concepts as they watch, rather than simply the content. I decided to ask ChatGPT for help, since it is good at writing questions and is probably familiar with a summary of the film.

My prompt was to “write short answer questions about the 2016 film The Founder that relate to business communications, business ethics, values, and decision-making.” Here is what I got back:

Here are some short-answer questions about the 2016 film The Founder that relate to business communications, ethics, values, and decision-making:

Business Communications:
-How did Ray Kroc use persuasive communication to convince the McDonald brothers to franchise their restaurant?
-What role did effective communication play in Kroc’s ability to expand McDonald’s nationally?
-What were the consequences of the communication breakdown between Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers as the franchise expanded?
-How did Ray Kroc use advertising and branding to communicate the McDonald’s image to the public?

Business Ethics:
-Was Ray Kroc’s decision to take over the McDonald’s brand ethical? Explain your reasoning.
-Discuss an ethical dilemma Ray Kroc faced when dealing with the original McDonald’s brothers.
-How did Ray Kroc’s actions toward the McDonald brothers reflect a potential conflict between business ethics and business success?

Values:
-What values did the McDonald brothers prioritize when running their original restaurant, and how did these differ from Ray Kroc’s values?
-How did Ray Kroc’s value of expansion and growth impact his business decisions?
-In what ways did Ray Kroc’s personal values influence the way he treated his business partners?

Decision-Making:
-What were the key factors that influenced Ray Kroc’s decision to break his agreement with the McDonald brothers?
-How did Ray Kroc’s decision-making process differ from that of the McDonald brothers when it came to the business?
-What role did risk-taking play in Ray Kroc’s decisions to expand McDonald’s?
-Discuss how Ray Kroc’s decision to cut costs by using powdered milkshakes reflects his approach to decision-making.

These questions can help examine key aspects of business ethics, values, and decision-making within the context of The Founder.

These are not horrible questions, but I certainly wouldn’t use all of them as is. For ChatGPT’s content to be useful, it must be filtered and edited to meet your specific needs. This is where we give the content more substance and functionality.

Elevating the AI-generated Content

I use ChatGPT for lesson planning and question-writing a lot, but I am almost never handing students ChatGPT-generated content. ChatGPT lights the spark, and I use my knowledge and experience with pedagogy and curriculum development to build something much more engaging and effective.

I took the best few questions from this ChatGPT prompt and started improving on them. I realized during that process that I could structure a lot of them into columns where the students could compare and contrast different concepts, relationships, problems, or dilemmas within the film. What I ultimately came up with is a document that students can use to take notes on these various ideas as they watch the film. The students can then use these notes to facilitate discussion after we are done watching the film.

Take a look at the discussion guide in this Google Doc. It’s nothing fancy that will be earning me any education innovator awards, but the columns allow students to organize ideas that can be easily consulted later for discussion. Notice that this document is unrecognizable from the ChatGPT content.

Facilitating Class Discussion

The hardest thing about class discussions is getting kids comfortable opening up and talking. I often use the think-pair-share or think-write-pair-share model to help with this problem. I will probably do that with this lesson this week in a process something like this:

• The students think and write as they watch the film.
• Pause during the film a few times to take notes. Pair up and discuss notes/questions during this time.
• After the film, pair again with someone different than who you talked with during the film. Tell them what you talked about with your other partner and what your takeaways were.
• Class discussion: Now we are finally ready to share with the full class, discussing and debating big questions about the film.

By the time we get to the full class discussion, the students have already written copious notes about the film and discussed them aloud in a comfortable small group environment. Now the full class discussion will feel a lot easier.

By the time we get to the full class discussion, I will invite students to be more opinionated about the topics. They have their notes to use as supporting evidence, so now they can make claims about the topic, and it may not even take much prompting from me to get the discussion going.

Wrap-Up

So why is the discussion guide document so drastically different from the ChatGPT prompt list? What’s really happening here is that the discussion guide has students take notes during the film and organize ideas that will allow them to answer the AI-generated questions during class discussion. If the lesson executes perfectly (it never does), I never even have to ask these questions, because the students have thought enough about it that they are ready to just pour out ideas to each other. But–more likely–I can still use these AI-generated prompts or prompts like it to facilitate class discussion, and the notes the kids have taken on the discussion guide will empower them to share something of value during that activity.

So yeah, I suppose we are watching a movie and responding to AI-generated prompts for our last week before fall break. But this lesson is so much more than that. The students are looking for evidence, making claims based on those evidence, and discussion those with an audience. These are crucial writing and critical thinking skills that are being exercises without simply making the kids sit down and write.