March 1, 2017 Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Cato Institute just published a new Handbook for Policymakers, where some attention is devoted to K-12 education. As I read the part pertaining to the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), I continued to reflect on AIER’s Teach-the-Teachers Initiative (TTI) and its role in increasing economic knowledge for teachers and students.

As I promised in an earlier blog, I would like to explore each criterion of an exemplary professional development program analyzed in the recent report, “Bridging the Gap: Paving the Pathway from Current Practice to Exemplary Professional Learning,” published by the Frontline Research and Learning Institute.

The first criterion is sustained learning. I described in a previous blog how TTI satisfies it. Today I want to examine the second criterion, which is intensity. The Bridging the Gap report defines a professional development program as intensive when it is “focused on a discreet concept, practice or program.” Since our workshop is of substantial duration (38 hours) we concentrate on several economic concepts – money and inflation, business cycles and unemployment, and government and the economy. These are the topics that were established as a core interest of AIER by our founder, Col. E.C. Harwood, in 1930-40.

As participants in AIER’s workshops are exposed to these economic concepts, we demonstrate innovative methods of teaching them to high school students. For example, the Unemployment Survey lesson uses role-playing to introduce a nuanced Bureau of Labor Statistics approach to the unemployment rate calculation. As participants struggle to decide if stay-at-home mothers or retired accountants are counted as part of the labor force, they start to appreciate the procedural difficulty of data collection and analysis. In addition, by allowing supplementary topics to bolster students’ interest in the subject matter, teachers are able to engage the class in substantive discussions and debates as well as to create coherence and linkages among various fields of study. I described earlier the innovative pedagogy involving the Unemployment Survey in math, statistics, special education and ESL/English language classes.

Even though TTI does not focus on a single concept, we deliver a coherent program that integrates the economic knowledge gained with creative delivery of this knowledge to 21st century learners. We advocate the practice of active exploration, engagement, and fun. We emphasize the importance of assessment of student learning outcomes in order to adjust a lesson to reach every student in a classroom. We go deep and provide continuous mentoring to teachers who opt for implementing the lesson idea developed at the workshop in their classes.

These features make AIER’s Teach-the-Teachers workshops intensive, thus satisfying the intensity criterion.

Picture: Participants at AIER’s Teach-the-Teachers workshop in Boston in June 2016. Photo by Leah LaRiccia.

 

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Natalia Smirnova, PhD

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