Capitalizing on a Value Added Workshop

Abstract

Elementary teachers are generally scared to death at the thought of teaching economics as either a course or a unit within a regular course. They still remember their undergraduate programs of earlier years as a terrible and frightening ordeal. We focused our main attention on this fear and developed a program to help to alleviate this fear so as to spur a renewed interest in an exciting discipline. This program is divided into a three-step procedure: 1. We offer a summer workshop which explores selected topics within the framework of a theme such as money, role of government, or consumerism, rather than the traditional principles of economics. 2. The participants are shown a film-slide presentation of previous teachers who have actually presented an economics unit to their classes. We emphasize that these colleagues were past workshop participants with no previous background in economics and yet were able to produce economics units to a fourth-grade science class or even a kindergarten class. 3. During the workshop each participant learns some of the basics of economics and is exposed to many of the teaching resources that are available to teach an economics unit. We then help them to prepare their own unit which they will present to their class at a later date. When the time comes to do this, we attend their classes to record and film the unit to add to our existing slide presentation. Thus we expand the collection by including the performances of additional teachers to be used for the next workshop. It is also an incentive to the current workshop participants. The results more than justify our efforts, especially when we consider the low cost. The slide presentation is inexpensive and being highly mobile, we can easily attend the participants' classrooms with very little disturbance. We have had excellent results in alleviating much of the fear of economics and a multiplier effect in the new units that the elementary teachers prepared for their classes. In addition, we have gained such by-products as a recruiting device for new participants, a fund-raising program, and by lending the film out to community groups we also expand the teaching of economics to continuing education groups.