Want to teach your students about financial literacy? Want to reinforce the importance of working hard to be successful in life? Want to have some fun with your class? Consider setting up a Classroom economy.
I came across this concept from the awesome Thom Gibson after listening to him on John Spencer’s podcast. He has created a heap of useful resources not only describing what this is and how it can work in your classroom, but also a short online training course. I completed the course and then embarked on setting up a classroom economy. Here’s how I did it:
Step 1: Set the scene
Explain to the students that the class will model itself on running as a business. I inform them that that I will be the business owner and I will employ students to do jobs, for which they will earn virtual money that they can do stuff with such as buy virtual houses, cars and use to bid for items in auctions. The reason are two fold. Firstly to reinforce class expectations including the value of working hard (the harder they work, the more money they can earn). Secondly to teach students some financial literacy skills such as managing finances, saving, and investing.
Step 2: Create a set of Class expectations
As teachers, we all have our expectations for students in our classes. Often at the beginning of the year we do an activity to have some student input into these class rules. Over the past few years I have reframed this as not only having expectations for all, but if students meet those expectations, they can have a number of privileges. This then acts as a contract where students can agree to the terms, and if they do they can participate in the classroom economy (I’ve never had any students refuse in the 4 years I have been running this in my class).
Step 3: Create a job list
Now you get your students to apply for class jobs. Rather than just make stuff up, I checked out this list from Thom Gibson’s course that I used as inspiration to make my own list. The job needs to have some authenticity to it and I’ve used some of them to ‘outsource’ some of the tasks that I do. A great example is the ‘Visual Display Artist’. This job is to design a new Google Classroom banner each week. This has turned out great as we regularly get refreshes for the digital hub of our classroom. This is something that I would do when I remembered, but now that it is a student job, it gets done more regularly and to a higher standard than me! Check out some examples below:
One thing I explain is that everyone will get an income, which I’ve called the Universal Basic Income. But I also deduct some expenses for being in the class (electricity, wifi, desk rent) so all students end up with a meagre amount left over at the end of the week. I invite all students to apply for ‘Tama tu, tama ora” or ‘Tohunga” (detailed in the job description below) that enables students to have a significantly higher income than their expenses. After that, they can apply for the variety of jobs listed. Some of my favourites are Bouncer (organised the class line for those who need to line up), Clerk (to handle any admin of giving out and collecting in resources), and Yogi (who runs a short session after returning from lunch to refocus students on their learning).
Step 4: Run your classroom economy!
I use a New Zealand based website called Banqer to handle the admin. It has two versions of class banking and I use the Primary version as it has better control over class jobs. Students can apply for the class jobs and I have enough so that any one who wants a job can get one (so even though I only have 16 listed jobs , some have 2 positions such as Bouncer). Part of the application process is to write a short CV and so we can have a class discussion around what type of information should go in this (previous work experience, characteristics such as hard worker etc). Once all the job have been allocated, I have the weekly pay to be automatically credited to student accounts on a Thursday. On a Friday, one task that Class captains need to do is deduct any wages for students who didn’t do their jobs that week. The Class captains can be made ‘Bankers’ of the website and so can manage these transactions.
Step 5: Have an auction
So now the students have earned all this cash, what do you do with it?
Firstly, have a class auction. Buy some prizes (including some mystery bags) and have students bid for each item.
Secondly, have an emoji race. Students can bet money on a particular emoji for either the pot of money bet, or a set prize.
In summary, I’ve tried this in my class over the last five years and after a number of iterations, find it really adds to the classroom culture. It’s amazing how keen students are to earn extra virtual dollars and it also serves as a great vehicle to teach financial literacy.
