By Michael Staten, Professor and Director, TCAI
Partnerships have been a hallmark of the Take Charge America Institute’s operations since its founding seven years ago. Not only do good partners expand what we can accomplish with limited resources, but they also make projects more fun and rewarding for everyone involved. In this issue I’d like to tell you about several of our key partnerships, including two exciting new initiatives that have developed over the past year.
Without question, our oldest and broadest partnership has been through our Family Economics and Financial Education (FEFE) project. This nationwide collaborative effort brings together content experts, school administrators, and teachers to create activity-based personal finance lessons for high school and middle school students. Classroom teachers provide an endless stream of creative ideas for new activities that we incorporate into revised lessons in an ongoing cycle of program development and improvement. An interactive FEFE educator website helps to sustain an ongoing dialogue between FEFE staff at the University of Arizona and teachers nationwide who put the material in front of their students. As a result, the FEFE lesson plans and materials are constantly changing and improving based on teacher feedback about what works. As of January 2011, the curriculum has over 23,000 registered educators nationwide who can access and download all parts of the curriculum, free of charge. FEFE’s success and popularity is largely attributable to a project model built on a true partnership with teachers and schools.
The quality of FEFE lessons was acknowledged by the U.S. Treasury Department when it recently announced its 2011 National Financial Capability Challenge and accompanying teacher toolkit. This year’s Challenge is intended to help high school educators motivate and teach students the critical skills to improve their budgeting, saving and investing capabilities. The Challenge culminates in a voluntary online exam for high school students that will provide a yardstick for measuring their financial knowledge and decision skills.
The educator toolkit on the Treasury’s website contains lessons from a select group of financial education curriculum providers, including three FEFE lessons (Understanding Your Paycheck; Types of Insurance; Protecting Yourself Against Identity Theft). Readers can learn more about the Challenge and the educator toolkit at www.challenge.treas.gov.
In another important partnership, TCAI has been collaborating with several national organizations to develop and pilot-test a professional development program for teachers to improve their core knowledge of personal finance concepts. Beginning in March, 2010, the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) took a leadership role to create a financial literacy training institute for K-12 teachers. NEFE brought together representatives from the Council on Economic Education, the FDIC, FEFE/University of Arizona, the National Jump$tart Coalition, and Junior Achievement to discuss a collaborative training effort. Discussions also included input from both the U.S. Departments of Education and Treasury. An initial pilot training event was held for the Chicago Public Schools in August 2010. Based on feedback from that event, the curriculum agenda for a full 3-day training program was created during the fall of 2010. The pilot test of the 3-day “institute” hosted 150 Colorado teachers in Denver in January 2011. The local partners, including Colorado Jump$tart, the Colorado Council on Economic Education, and of course the NEFE team did a marvelous job in pulling together an ambitious event on a relatively short notice. Sample materials from all of the collaborating organizations were made available to teachers (in a scaled-down version of the Treasury Challenge toolkit mentioned above), but the focus of the three days was on content training, not curriculum options.
Organizers of an event like this one always hope that the program hits the mark with the audience. There is reason to think the demand is there. NEFE-funded research conducted at the University of Wisconsin in 2009 found that fewer than 20% of teachers surveyed nationwide felt competent to teach financial education topics, and 70% said they were willing to get formal financial education training. Having attended the entire January pilot institute (during which I led a half-day “Credit and Debt” training module) I can attest to both the enthusiasm of the teachers and the high value they placed on the content, as revealed in their comments and questions. I am convinced that these types of professional development opportunities are much needed and worth the effort. Note to potential funders: Resources devoted to training the trainers leverage very quickly into widespread impact on students. Future pilot opportunities (and the inevitable need for funding) are under discussion. TCAI will continue to do what we can to support this important effort. Stay tuned – as the concept evolves there may be a version of the training institute opening near you.
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