An Essential Guide to Finding High School Finance Lesson Plans

How has our offering managed to perform out there on the ground, in real professional spaces? Now let’s take an in-depth look at a real-world example of a professional successfully leveraging our high school finance lesson plans:

Sandra is a high school counselor in a small town, where she has been helping students for nearly two decades. At the moment, she is responsible for 53 students that are very close to their graduation dates. As a very proactive counselor, she felt a responsibility to do her best in getting these students ready for success in their financial lives, so she was hoping to put together high school finance lesson plans that would be beneficial for them in the future. She was just a counselor, however, so she was unsure how to proceed with providing this type of knowledge – which is why she ended up reaching out for some assistance.

During some regular bi-monthly meetings, she did an informal financial literacy survey of the high school students, realizing that the majority of them had almost zero knowledge when it comes to responsible money habits. It was in that moment that she knew an easy-to-digest resource geared toward complete novices would be ideal for this particular group.

Sandra already knew two things for certain: there was a need for financial literacy education and these students were super new to the subject. Her initial plan was to assist this group to quickly get a solid working knowledge of personal finance concepts, mostly through recommending some structured material. The long-term goal was that these students would reach a level of total proficiency before graduation came around. At that early moment, however, she knew that sticking to just core concepts would be the best idea for the first finance lesson plans for high school students.

At that point in time, Sandra already had an idea of what she wanted to do in both the short term and the long term. The next action would need to be planning: What pace should she choose? What about the format? It would be best if she could get a course that’s divided up into easily digestible portions. This caused her to opt for self-paced high school finance lesson plans.

Sandra suddenly understood that her idea for this finance curriculum for high school remained a little broad, especially given the fact that she wanted to focus on just getting the ball rolling. She needed to narrow the primary focus of the program, so she decided to organize the beginning segment around something they were interested in – the top votes from students were lessons on how to buy a car.

The ideal program for this specific group would be one that could effectively deliver this vital information, while still being able to accommodate the students’ wildly mismatched schedules. It obviously wouldn’t be viable to gather everyone in the same room at the same time, so she ended up going with a flexible, modular course option for the first of the finance lesson plans for high school students.

Sandra certainly had the ability to teach to this group directly with financial literacy lesson plans her school provided, but that might not have been the best route if she truly wanted to achieve her goals. She needed to find someone to help her – a person who knew how to build high school finance lesson plans that were entertaining while still being effective. Thankfully, she was able to get in contact with a NFEC Certified Educator that was skilled at infusing fun into dry material.

The group was made up of 53 participants, of which 48 were able to finish the entire thing – which means the success rate was 87%. After the program ended, the participants who finished were asked to complete a survey, with 96% of them indicating that their knowledge on the topic had been boosted “significantly” as a consequence of the course. Once all had been said and done, Sandra constructed a detailed report that underscored the outcome of the program so she would be able to show how successful she was in teaching finance to high school students.