Instructional+Strategies

The reason for using the discussion method is because students must learn how to work together and clearly communicate their ideas. Not only does this require students to share their own ideas with a small group of peers, but it also requires small groups of students to communicate their group’s discussion to the entire class. The presentation will be relatively informal and, therefore, the hope is that students will grow more comfortable with presenting in front of a group.
 * Discussion** – Discussion will take place two times during the class period. The first will have the students discuss, in a whole-class setting, aspects of scarcity. The second time, students will be broken up into small groups in order to discuss comparative advantage; their task is to come up with a real-world example of comparative advantage. This will require students to collaborate and work together in order to come up with a viable example. Students will give a short presentation of their findings to the class as a group – although short, the presentation should make use of graphics and some resource to support their claims. The students will use short PowerPoint, Glogster, Prezi, or other presentation tool in order to report their group’s discussion.

This will lay the groundwork for the students to dive deeper into the matter of opportunity cost and its real-world application. Students will be equipped to understand that each decision they make has a cost added to it that may not necessarily be overtly economic in nature. Once students understand this, they will be able to complete the assignment that stems from this section of the lesson: a one page, double-spaced paper with two examples of real-world scenarios that demonstrate opportunity cost.
 * Presentation ** – students will learn about opportunity cost through the instructor presenting a variety of materials and mediums. The instructor will define opportunity cost and give a couple of quick, easy to understand examples. The instructor will then show a short online video that demonstrates opportunity cost on a deeper level. In conjunction, the instructor will provide an article to students that demonstrates opportunity cost on a social level. The instructor will use an online video along with an article found online.