High School Resources
Our financial education high school curriculum, Empowered!, is focused on 7 core principles: Economic Concepts, Money Management, Banking, Credit, Insurance, Investing, and Consumer Protection.
High School Curriculum
Empowered! is a complete 9 week curriculum unit that can be used to support teachers responsible for fulfilling the FinEd unit for high school students.
Empowered! is suitable for use in any academic discipline or course in which the FinEd Unit is embedded. It includes all 7 required Financial Education content topics (Economic Concepts, Money Management, Banking, Credit, Insurance, Investing, and Consumer Protection), as students progress to create and describe their own vision and plan for financial empowerment.
Empowered! modules are linked individually below. Access both Empowered! and a continually currated list of free resources, suggestions for implementation, and other resources, check our Empowered! Curriculum Crosswalk.
For High School teachers looking for curriculum relevant for a semester or full year Please reach out to Dustin Voss, dkvoss@cps.edu.
Curricular Resources
- Empowered Curriculum: The complete 9-week curriculum unit created by CPS to support teachers responsible for fulfilling the FinEd unit for high school students (last updated 2018).
- Curriculum Crosswalk: A supplement to Empowered! that is constantly updated as a support document for High School teachers containing links to teaching resources and support in planning students’ required FinEd unit.
- Financial Education Writing/Word Processing Prompts: Writing prompts to assess students’ learning in Financial Education.
- Appendix B: Extended Learning Opportunities: A few ideas from Empowered!’s Appendix B for students to take informed action.
- CPS FinEducators Google Classroom: Join our community and see new resources posted weekly.
- Ngpf.org: Units, Lessons, case studies, interactives, arcade, professional learning, and more.
- ECON Lowdown: From the St. Louis Fed, search-filter-enabled learning activities for k-12.
- MRU.org: Entire courses and teaching resources. Primarily for Economics resources.
- Cowin Financial Literacy Program: From the Teachers College at Columbia University, high quality case studies and teacher guides for your FinEd unit.
- EconEdLink: The Council on Economic Educations search-filter-enabled resources for K12. Includes the assessment platform Ready Assessments.
- Econ Essentials from CME Group: Lessons, modules, videos, and more from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
- Discover Pathways to Financial Success: Student-Facing modules.
- EverFi: Our partner offers dozens of online student-facing learning modules accessible through CPS cleve.
- Empowered Curriculum Crosswalk: For our CPS teachers, resources organized to support and update the Empowered Curriculum.
- For teachers or administrators wishing to stay current on updated curricular resources and opportunities related to Financial Education, or to share your own schools’ success, please join our Google Classroom.
- ODLSS list of supports for Diverse Learners: Get Real and Practical Money Skills. Examine the entire list for even more resources to address the needs of diverse learners.
- CAUSE CHICAGO: A resource guide for immigrant/undocumented students created and organized CPS Department of College and Career Success.
- BankOn Chicago: Not a curricular resource, but a project to provide high quality, no overdraft-fee accounts to Chicago residents. Applicable for teachers serving underserved communities.
- Sign up for a Financial Education Professional Development sessions on our FinEd Training Calendar!
- Additional training is available from our partner organization NGPF. Particpants can receive CPDUs for participation by completing our reflection form. These courses come highly recommended, "This course was really wondeful", "I got many interesting investing charts to share with students", "This will help me and my students study teh connection between money and happiness.
- For additional training offered from our office and our many partners, stay connected by joining our Google Classroom
- Are you curious as to who fulfills the Financial Education requirement across the different schools in our district? Access our tracking database here. Need to provide an update for your school? Please email Dustin Voss, dkvoss@cps.edu
- NPR’s Planet Money Podcast
- Teach and Retire Rich Podcast (11/12/21)
- Non-profit: 403bwise.org
- CPS Virtual Library