As we head into Thanksgiving and prepare to spend time with wonderful family and delicious food, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past month. November is a busy conference month, and we were certainly out in full force.

Below you can find a recap of each event we attended, but first I wanted to start with a story from the last day of the tour, at the FBLA FNLC Conference in Baltimore. I was packing up my supplies when a single teacher strolled through the exhibit hall, saying she was looking for NGPF. I told her she’d found them, so she sat down and we began chatting.

Her name is Martha Somers, and she teaches Personal Finance at Broad Run High School in Ashburn, VA. She felt the need to seek us out because she had some questions about how to access our content, but also wanted to pass along this nugget:

I love the Next Gen Personal Finance materials which I first became acquainted with last summer at the FBLA National Conference in Chicago, IL when I was introduced to Jessica, Next Gen’s rep, in the exhibit hall at the conference.  There is so much out there on the Web about teaching Personal Finance to high school students that its sometimes hard to determine what is useful and what is not and what is going to work for you and what is not.  I was impressed with the quality of the materials that I found with this website. I was much more impressed than several of the other websites with the same topics. They continually add new features to their site and they also connect with teachers through their email.  Their materials are well researched and well presented.

Oddly, on the bus trip to the [FBLA conference], I connected with another teacher from my county who was also using Next Gen’s lessons and had the same comments that I had about the materials.  It is well worth checking out.  I recommend it highly.

How cool is that? We know there are thousands of personal finance teachers out there, so the power of collaboration is so important. We’re trying to connect this community together through our work, but there’s no substitute for sharing with one another.

So thanks to Martha and all the teachers like her for not only doing amazing work spreading personal finance education, but also for sharing best practices with one another and improving the field as a whole, one classroom at a time. Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and we’ll see you on the other side.

Below is a recap of our activities at conferences the past month, as well as some materials we shared at them.

W!SE MoneyPower Conference – Nov. 3 (New York City, NY)

NGPF exhibited at the Working in Support of Education’s (W!SE) 13th National MoneyPower Conference. This one-day event brought together educators from around the nation to celebrate their achievements in becoming Gold-level teachers and their students for achieving Blue Ribbon status for their school, through excellence on the W!SE teacher and student financial certification test.

Jump$tart National Educator Conference – Nov. 6-8 (National Harbor, MD)

The Jump$tart NEC brings together more than 200 of the most dedicated personal finance teachers in the U.S. for fantastic professional development and networking opportunities. We delivered to a standing-room only audience of teachers on how they can use NGPF to find high-quality content and professional development opportunities quickly and efficiently, to save them time and improve their ability to educate their students.

AFCPE 2015 Symposium – Nov. 18-20 (Jacksonville, FL)

The AFCPE symposium brings together financial counselors, planners and educators from across the nation to share best practices and follow the latest research in the field. NGPF presented to an eager audience of financial counselors and educators on how they can use Personalized Learning Plans (PLPs) to provide goals and targeted support for their clients to succeed independently, building on the progress made during limited in-person sessions. Check out the slides for our presentation on Leveraging Open-Source (i.e Free) Resources to Create Personalized Learning Plans (PLPs).

FBLA Fall National Leadership Conference – Nov. 21 (Baltimore, MD)

The FBLA FNLC brings together students from FBLA chapters across the East Coast for a day of great sessions enhance their personal finance knowledge. NGPF presented to more than 100 students on how they can Create a Post-College Budget, illuminating the wide variety of financial choices they will need to make when they enter the working world. Check out the slides and accompanying spreadsheet for our Creating a Post-College Budget presentation to use in your classroom or FBLA chapter.

About the Author

Andrew Furth

Andrew comes from a family of educators, and joined Teach for America after graduating from UCLA with a degree in English. During his three years teaching Social Studies, in both rural Arkansas and urban San Francisco, he realized the potential of online tools to amplify the reach and impact of learning for teachers and students. Andrew joined NGPF in 2014, bringing his educational expertise to designing lessons while learning on the job how to manage his own finances (which comes in handy in San Francisco, where the crazy rent means budgets are always tight).