As you plan ahead for the semester, you may feel you have to rush to finish your Personal Finance scope and sequence to make sure you cover it all. Here are some great tips on what to do if your Semester Course lessons keep running long, requiring two class periods instead of one...

[post last updated Sept. 4, 2024]

Tip 1: Be Mindful on the Intros

For example, in Other Types of Insurance, the Intro prompt asks three great questions about risk: what risks do you take in an average day, what are the consequences, and what can you do to protect yourself against those risks. We created this prompt to get students thinking, but robust answers to all three questions aren't necessary for success in the remaining lesson.

Have students think in their own brains, pair-share with a partner, or jot some quick answers for a minute or two, but then move on with the lesson. Even really fun conversation needs to come to an end, so make sure the lesson doesn't get stalled in the Intro. 

Tip 2: Be Selective with Activities

Admittedly, sometimes our NGPF curriculum designers had too many good options. This is the case with Renters & Homeowners Insurance and How to Access Health Insurance, each of which has two NGPF activities embedded.

If you open up each Student Activity Packet, here's what I would recommend for each lesson: 

For Renters & Homeowners Insurance, there is a FINE PRINT: Renters Insurance Agreement. Students get to see a real renters agreement and practice skimming the fine print for answers But, the unit exam on Insurance doesn't test that skill, so you can skip that activity. Do the second DO IT activity instead, which is a Data Crunch comparing the cost of Homeowners and Renters insurance premiums. It's potentially shocking to see how much cheaper renters insurance is and might convince them to add it to their budgets for the future. 

For How to Access Health Insurance, the lesson's Intro is a Data Crunch containing a graph on how Americans get health insurance, which is a wonderful framing for the lesson. But, instead of having students do all five questions and then also reviewing it as a class, you could shorten it up by just projecting the graph and having a brief conversation about what they notice. The second activity is a state-level research exploration of various insurance policies for where your students live.

Notice that the directions instruct students to just do part 2 on health insurance, not the whole worksheet, which would take substantially longer. For part 2, you could have students work in group and jigsaw answers; you could trim it further by eliminating Medicare research because it likely doesn't pertain to your students.

Throughout the Semester Course, there will be other opportunities like this for you to use your best judgment as a teacher on which activities to dive in deep on and which to trim or remove entirely. You know your students and standards best!

Tip 3: Skip the Edpuzzle feature

Intro to Insurance includes one of my favorite videos (spoiler alert: Jenny's cat gets hurt playing hockey!), and we've included it as an Edpuzzle, which means students all watch on their own devices, can move as slowly or quickly as they want through it, and if you have an Edpuzzle account with all your students attached, you can track their progress.

Great! But probably more time consuming than just playing the video on your projector for the whole class and having them circle the right answers directly on their Student Activity Packet. You'll save time because students won't need to get oriented to that platform/logged in if applicable, won't need to have their own headphones, won't linger on any one question too long, etc. 

The Student Activity Packet and Lesson Guide link directly to the Edpuzzle version, but everyone can quickly get to just the video by clicking the YouTube link in the bottom right. 

Hopefully these tips help spark your ingenuity when it comes to keeping Semester Course lessons to one class period! 

About the Author

Jessica Endlich

When I started working at Next Gen Personal Finance, it's as though my undergraduate degree in finance, followed by ten years as an educator in an NYC public high school, suddenly all made sense.