To fully understand how the process of teaching students about money functions, read the case history that follows:

Wanda Ballard, School Counselor at Marion High School, was interested in teaching students about money. This interest was based on the fact that several students had come to her with questions about getting scholarships, grants, and loans to help pay for college. Realizing that many more students might share this pressing need, Wanda wanted to host a workshop that would give them the relevant information.

Wanda thought it over and settled on a three-hour weekend workshop teaching money skills for her initial objective. Her counseling sessions had taught her the students sought information on various options for funding college educations. She believed the students could retain a lot of valuable information in that time frame, and be able to break it down and apply it to different uses – in other words, getting to the “Analyze” level on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Higher-order Thinking.

With Wanda’s short- and long-term objectives out of the way, she needed to consider delivery and pacing for the workshop. She had three hours to play with, and a well-focused agenda for teaching students about money. Wanda decided to use timeline-based pacing to coordinate with deadlines for loan, grant, and scholarship applications. She wanted to deliver the workshop in-person because she already had a lot of the relevant materials in hand.

Wanda was set with delivery, but now she needed to fine-tune her topics for teaching students about money. The time-driven focus of her class would be finding funding for college. She would address the high schoolers’ need to drum up funds for higher education, while also giving them some key money management skills and resources related to loan qualification.

At Stage 5, Wanda needed to select an educator. She really wanted to be the one, but she lacked specific credentials for teaching students about money. What to do? Wanda lucked out – she was able to find a certification program that would prepare her to present a top-notch workshop. This program was titled “Certified Financial Education Instructor (CFEI),” and it was spearheaded by the NFEC.

What was Wanda’s next task? Choosing the money management presentation materials she would use for teaching students about money. She was pursuing something that could fit into a variety of schedules and that had practical applicability in the real world. Wanda located just the thing – an independent, compliance-approved curriculum with hands-on, action-based lessons.

Now Wanda was ready to present her workshop. On the day of, 16 students were in attendance. Wanda’s measures of success included 1) whether students completed at least one scholarship or grant application (15 of them, or almost 94%, did), and 2) whether students received a grant or scholarship in the future (25% of them did). She gathered the latter information and printed it in the school newspaper to help prove the success of her initial attempt at teaching students about money, and thereby attract more students to attend future workshops.