Most of the ideas I used to enrich my economics/social studies curriculum came from Social Education, the official journal of the National Council for the Social Studies. In particular, there was one really relevant and practical issue called "Raising Interest in Economics (Volume 67, Number 2, March 2003) which focused on teaching economics innovatively.
One article ["Is Economics Your Worst Nightmare?" p. 73-78] gave a good overview of what an innovative curriculum [unit plans and lessons within a unit] in Economics might look like. In particular, they gave a statement of six principles of economics which I would later adapt as the "enduring concepts" I would like students to walk away with from my class. They include "1)people choose, 2)people's choice involve opportunity costs, 3)people respond to incentives in predictable ways, 4) people create economic systems that influence individual choices and incentives 5)people gain when they trade voluntarily 6)people's choices have consequences that lie in the future" (p75).
Another article ["Why Don't People Save When They know They Should?" p79-83] gave me some insight about how to make economics more practical for the students. Students need to learn about the financial decisions and choices they will have to make in the future such as savings and investing, having a budget, credit card use, and earning an income. There were some case studies in which students analyzed costs and benefits (or opportunity costs and trade-offs) in financial decisions. I was able to adapt and use similar examples for my lesson plan on opportunity costs in which students considered the costs and benefits before making choices. I wished that I could have taught lessons on the other topics as students really would have benefited from them in a very practical way.
In addition, there was an article ["Activity-Based Economics" p85-9] that really influenced and shaped the planning and implementation of my educational objectives. Activity-Based Economics was "an approach to teaching economics that includes three important components: an active learning methodology, a consistent application of the economic way of thinking, and a focus on sound and challenging economic content" (p85). Though I had thought about incorporating activities, cooperative group learning, and a content-rich, standards-based curriculum, the ideas put forth in the article about activity-based economics really integrated and connected all three things into an effective approach and explained the educational reasons for implementing that approach into my classroom. In particular, there was a very good explanation of active learning methodology which I was able to use in implementing different interactive instructional techniques in my classroom. The article lists different lessons and possible active learning instructional strategies to use in each lesson such as a trading simulation which helps them understand how people benefit through voluntary trade, solving an economic mystery, a simulation of buyers and sellers in a wheat market, a classroom auction to demonstrate the price-setting, and a role play about specialization (p86).
In particular, I was able to really use the idea of activity based learning in Lesson 9: Basic Economic Questions when I expanded upon the lesson to incorporate some application of the ideas inspired from reading the professional journal. One of the possible active learning strategies was the "invention convention in which students take on the role of entrepreneurs, devising inventions to market and sell to their fellow students, later calculating their total revenue, total costs, and profits (or losses)" (p86). Thus, in the revised and expanded lesson [see parts b & c], I was able to adapt the ideas from my journal reading to really enrich my curriculum. Students worked in groups to create a product/business to benefit the Parkway students, make an informative brochure to market their product, and go through a simulation by presenting their work to the Parkway Foundation (hypothetical venture-capitalists). Though I initially had ideas to include much cooperative group work and activity-based learning into my curriculum, the professional journal articles really enabled to put these ideas into action.
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