Passionate about finance, two of my friends and I co-founded a finance club with the aim of spreading foundational financial literacy in our school to students as young as 7th to 12th graders. We believe that the Finance club is a great way to educate students at an early stage about basic and complex personal finance, investing and corporate finance concepts so that people are facilitated to make more informed financial decisions. Our curriculum was designed in a way where we start with the basics and create a strong foundation so that even a 7th grader can understand. Some common themes to which we gave heavy weight to in our curriculum were stock market trading/investing and personal finance as these interested students the most.
LO1: Identify their own strengths and develop areas for personal growth
My friends and I were highly passionate about finance and economics with a keen interest in stock markets. The main reason that we had chosen finance was that we had some prior knowledge of the subject and were comfortable teaching the basics of it, hence, it was a strength for us. The curriculum designing, activity planning, delivering the content and clearing the doubts became easy because of our strength in finance. One key area that I got to work on through this venture is being accountable. Previously I had done no long-term venture that required me to be accountable and manage things alongside my own coursework. Due to the Finance club, I was responsible for creating the course content, making the central presentation and delivering it, organising activities like debates, and simulations, managing an Excel sheet etc. This made me develop a sense of accountability and leadership quality facilitated by the development of my self-management and time-management skills.
LO2: Demonstrate that they have undertaken challenges, developing new skills in the process
The biggest challenge for me was to keep our students interested in the concepts we were teaching. There was one time when we were not able to retain our old students in the second term after vacation as the sessions got monotonous for some and seemed insignificant to others. It required our passion and zeal with some critical evaluation of what concepts to teach and how to teach them so that we were able to attract more students. We started off with the basics and incorporated activities as much as possible such as Excel modeling, stock market simulators, debate competitions and research projects. Further, I got to develop public speaking skills as I had been apprehensive about speaking in front of a crowd ever since I was a child. This experience increased my confidence and communication skills and helped me get over my fear of public speaking by giving me the stage to speak in front of a crowd, some people whom I have never interacted with.
LO3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
I co-founded this club with my friends, and at the time, we were one of the first student-led clubs in the school. I took the initiative as this was our field of interest as well as the need of the hour. It was our intrinsic motivation which made us start this venture. I was accountable for creating the curriculum of the course, planning the activities and delivering the content in class alongside one student. The initial planning was done on Google Docs where we jotted down our ideas. We made use of tools such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, Google Drive, Google Spaces etc. to make the central presentation, keep track of the curriculum, manage all the digital files that are used and communicate with students respectively. We organized our sessions two times a week in the AS/PS slot and tried to make the session not a student-teacher class, but rather a lively and interactive session.
LO4: Show commitment to and perseverance to their CAS experiences
It took commitment and perseverance to keep the Finance Club running across the year. As mentioned above, in the second term, our attendance was very low and students were unwilling to come to the sessions. It was demotivating to us and to a few other students when the class strength was low but still, we continued our classes. We had to come up with new strategies to attract more students and regain the class strength, and we were able to do that because of our perseverance. Moreover, it was difficult to manage the club alongside my studies and schoolwork, but I was committed to keeping the finance club running and prioritized the club work with my studies simultaneously. During our examinations, we also had to take a pause from club work and focus on our studies, however, we continued the club.
LO5: Demonstrate skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
The finance club was a great opportunity for me to enhance my social skills, namely communication, and self management and time management skills. I had to continually interact and cooperate with my co-founders and divide roles so that the work is done efficiently. For example, one was assigned as operations manager and my other friend and I were the educators and curriculum planners. Before each class, we held a 10-minute meeting in which we discussed what to cover today. After the sessions, we discussed with the students what they liked about the class and what they would like us to focus on apart from the regular agenda. We also had to show our research skills so that we are able to extract authentic, reliable and suitable data for our purpose and create the central presentation, in which we made use of websites, videos, simulators etc.
Evidence
