Econosaurus

Right, I've been keeping half an eye on my econ competition spreadsheet (still a bit of a hot mess, but it's ticking over) and I reckon it's a good moment for a round-up. Here's everything that's open for entries as I write this, plus a handful landing around the start of September that are worth diarising now before you forget (I say this as someone who has forgotten more deadlines than I'd like to admit). A quick plug for the Econ Teacher Calendar, which I typically update

This is the second part of my write-up from the session I ran at the Bank of England Teacher Conference. The first part was all about sentence-level work, and you can find that here. This part is about moving beyond sophisticated sentences to more sophisticated overall pieces of work. It's worth remembering here that essay writing isn't one skill. It's probably dozens of skills bundled together, and there are loads of ways to make writing better. A lot of them sit around our

Here is an updated leaflet with some suggestions for your year 12s going into year 13 or even your year 11s going into year 12. I reocmmend printing this half size, double sided, in booklet formation (ie in page order 4,1,2,3 if your photocopier doesn't have that setting) for a 1-page leaflet. Handing it out at parents' evening works particularly well. Lots of teachers mentioned that they found the 'Pairings' section useful so I've added a couple more in there. If you want to

Earlier this week I ran a session at the Bank of England Teacher Conference on improving writing in economics A-level. This is a write-up of that session, partly so the delegates have it all in one place, and partly so anyone who couldn't make it can pinch the bits that are useful. All of the worksheets are available in the download at the end of the article. I'll be honest here and say that I haven't proofread this, but I knew that if I waited until I had it, it would be for

At the Bank of England Teacher Conference this I gave a talk on improving economic writing. I’ve got a much more detailed blog post coming with the full content of that presentation as I know quite a few people couldn’t make it on the day due to the weather. Even though the talk was on writing, we talked a bit about reading and I promised extra info on two tools. The first, I flagged in the talk itself; the other came up while I was chatting to a couple of people afterwards.

The Economics Olympiad is a competition open to any UK student aged 14 to 19, whether or not they study economics. It runs through four stages: an online multiple-choice test sat in school, a regional round hosted at a university, a national final in London, and an international final in Ancient Olympia, Greece. For a department it is a low-admin way to stretch able students, with the first round easy to run in a 40-minute window. The Resources page is worth a look too, since

[Admission: I actually wrote most of this a year ago and never got around to posting it.] A few years ago I wrote about an experiment I was just starting: getting a whole class to read the same non-fiction book together, a "Class Read". You can find that original post here, and it lays out where I started and why. I'm pleased to say the experiment stuck. This is also one of my Classroom Systems; you can take a look at the others here. I've packaged up all the resources that I

A not-perfect but fairly easy-to-implement system for regular reading. We really want my students to be reading, and ideally reading non-narrative non-fiction that builds up their contextual knowledge. So, what I was after was a system that gets students reading the right sort of stuff, at a level that's accessible to them, in a way that doesn't eat up a bunch of teacher time. I just posted about Class Read and I still love that system, but there are a few barriers to settin

Overview The World Cup Application Project is designed to help students develop their macroeconomic application and judgement skills. Although the project uses the structure of the World Cup, the focus is not on football (I have a blog post coming out with Economics of the World Cup links soon for that!) Students use the countries in World Cup groups as case studies for researching economic conditions and applying macroeconomic policy decisions. The project has two main stage