Consistent financial literacy teaching across Year 9
Financial literacy has been part of Year 9 at Mazenod College, a Catholic boys' school in Melbourne with around 1500 students, for as long as anyone can remember. Under Faculty Head of Commerce Nicholas Redfern and his expert team of Commerce teachers, it's grown into one of the most popular electives at the school, with 220 of 252 students choosing it each year, delivered with the same consistency across every classroom and every teaching team.
Before Banqer, the subject looked different depending on who was teaching it: Some people were really interested in the housing market, others were really interested in stocks.
Financial literacy covers so many different areas and staffing added to that variety. Teaching teams and documents can change from year to year, so what a class experienced depended partly on who picked up the subject next and what they carried over from the year before.
The Mazenod team wanted a shared structure that still left room for what individual teachers valued.
We found out about Banqer and thought that it was a great way to structure our financial literacy course, cover a broad range of topics, but also provide a consistent framework for the teachers to work from.
They kept some of their existing lessons to complement Banqer, such as one on buying a secondhand car, something Nicholas still sees as important for students to learn.
A shared bank of lesson plans meant a new teacher stepping into the subject worked from the same base as everyone else. We were quite impressed with the lesson plans. We were able to pick out the best parts and determine what we really wanted to convey in the 100 minutes of each lesson.
With multiple classes and changing teaching teams, maintaining a consistent program from year to year could require significant planning time. Having a ready-made starting point was something the whole faculty welcomed. The decision to adopt it went through the team before it went ahead: We met as a faculty on a couple of different occasions before we wanted to use Banqer, and got the whole faculty to give some input about how they would see it playing out in the classroom. I think overwhelmingly the feedback was really positive.
Teaching critical thinking through real financial decisions
Nicholas knew what he wanted as soon as he came across Banqer. This is everything that the students want to know about and are engaging with, so let's give them what they want. Financial literacy gives us the opportunity to focus on practical concepts students are genuinely interested in and will encounter beyond school. The curriculum's so broad and it's not about covering every single point in amazing detail at a Year 9 level. We thought, given the time that is available to us in this elective subject, let's pick the things that they're particularly interested in and want to learn about.
Our students are really interested in it. Previously we've had about 252 Year 9 students per year and around 220 of those students have picked this elective subject. Across the year we run 8 or 9 classes. There's great enthusiasm among the students, and the gamification and competition really helps with that. It creates a lot of different options for students to explore and engage with financial literacy.
Teachers introduce the content of an expansion through explicit instruction, then give students time to do the quiz and explore it for themselves within Banqer. As the Semester goes on and students spend more time in the platform, some go back and make changes to their investments or the bank account they chose at the start to improve their net worth.
We want students to be able to go away and say, I had a really good time studying financial literacy. I know a bit more about how interest works, or how insurances operate, or the difference between mortgage and renting. And I think if we hear that amongst the student body, then we've done a good job of teaching the program.
Nicholas points to one scenario as the clearest example of Banqer prompting real thinking. When you get the insurance pop up that your bathroom's flooded and you need to come up with some money to fix it, I think that's an interesting conundrum for some students. If you've saved money you can fix it with the money that you've saved, or you can pay the excess and deal with it through your insurance.
From there the conversation goes further than the immediate decision. If you choose the insurance option and the excess, what might that mean for the next year when you go to renew your policy again, now that you've had some claims? What's going to happen to the price potentially if you've had to do a full bathroom renovation?
There’s problem solving skills that come into it, and also critical thinking. It's not just having a superficial understanding of something. It's looking at the consequence, or why that's significant, or how that's going to impact something else. They’re the really rich conversations you can have with the students
Nicholas builds on that thinking in class discussion too. You can rent a house and have a roof over your head, but if you want to go and knock a wall down, you can't necessarily do that. So how will that impact the decision you make about housing? We really emphasize critical thinking with the decisions that you make.
Getting teachers and parents on board with Banqer
For Nicholas, the case for Banqer comes down to what it takes off teachers' plates. It provides so many options for how you could structure your financial literacy course. It takes a lot of the time in lesson planning out of our hands and provides us with a bank of ready-made resources that we can then choose what we'd like to deliver from that.
But he's clear that resources alone don't make something stick. It's got to be something that resonates with the teachers. As soon as you've got the teachers on board then the rest typically flows on from there.
Parents are part of that equation too. Mazenod families are highly engaged in their children’s education. Our students come from really nurturing, warm families, parents that care about them. We want them to go home and talk about what they’re learning. We have lots of parents that are small business owners, and students going home and talking about real world experiences with their parents is really key.
Nicholas made sure parents knew what was happening from the outset. "I wrote a letter to the parents explaining what we're introducing, and it was fantastic to read some of the positive parent feedback in response.
For teachers wondering about cost, Nicholas shares what works for Mazenod. “At Mazenod, Banqer is incorporated into our existing student resource arrangements rather than being funded separately by the faculty.”
“Banqer has become a valuable part of our Year 9 financial literacy program. It works well for our teachers, engages our students and gives families another opportunity to continue those conversations at home”
