Teaching Financial Crises

Teaching Financial Crises is an eight lesson resource that provides an organizing framework in which to contextualize all of the media attention that has been paid to the recent financial crisis.

Detailed Information

Teaching Financial Crises is an eight lesson resource that provides an organizing framework in which to contextualize all of the media attention that has been paid to the recent financial crisis, as well as put it in a historical context. The current events stories, opinion pieces, and other popular media pieces that are today in great supply have generally not connected to educational objectives, historical analysis, and economic processes and concepts that are used in the high school classroom. In Teaching Financial Crises, teachers will find a non-partisan and non-ideological resource to help them simplify and offer balanced perspectives on this challenging subject matter.

The publication is a standards-based set of lessons concerning critical issues related to financial crisis and the volatility that has accompanied recent, as well as historic, economic events. The resource has been aligned to economics content standards; and was written to include evergreen lessons that allow them to be of continual use; while germane to teaching about the recent crisis it is not simply applicable to current events topics in classrooms (which ultimately become outdated); and it is comprised of a variety of approaches to encourage higher-order thinking skills designed to assist students to engage in effective decision-making, undertake reasoned approaches to economic analysis, efficiently solve complex problems, and apply critical thinking skills.

The Council for Economic Education envisions a world in which people are empowered through economic and financial literacy to make informed and responsible choices throughout their lives as consumers, savers, investors, workers, citizens, and participants in our global economy.

Some of the areas in K-12 education we publish in include:

- Establishing and building credit

- Managing personal finances

- Understanding economics on a local, national, and global level

- Using economics in other subject areas: Social Studies, Geography, History, etc.