Thinking Foundation
Thinking Foundation is proud to become one of Jump$tart's newest members. The basic tenet of our work is that the explicit development of thinking abilities and problem solving is the foundation for learning. While supporting schools around the country and around the world, we have noticed an inconsistency in the way students learn financial literacy. The tens of millions of dollars spent on excellent resource materials developed by both public and private institutions often do not make its way into the classrooms of our nation, or into the minds of students. Thinking Foundation has a focus on transforming information into knowledge through the use of visual tools and other approaches to the direct facilitation of thinking and problem solving, especially for those with the greatest need. We believe we will be able to help restructure existing materials, promote revisions in state standards and guide professional development models that will explicitly support teachers in their efforts to help children learn about financial literacy as a decision making process that will ripple across almost every dimension of their lives. Our focus on research also offers a structure for documenting these best practices.
In more than three decades of working in schools, we have found little evidence that teachers or children have maximized their understanding of resources and how fiscal management can direct both their current and future lives. With the use of visual tools for organizing vast amounts of information and for synthesizing that information into high quality decision-making, students will have an expanded capability for not only learning new concepts but also developing strategies for thinking about how their actions impact their future outcomes in life. Over the past three years we have sponsored financial literacy forums across New York State. The feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly in support of having states and individual school districts expand their current efforts in financial literacy.
Thinking Foundation and the Teaching Financial Education group are striving, through local learning consortiums, to develop delivery mechanisms, refine, implement, and assess financial education activities to be incorporated into existing classes, and institute financial literacy courses in K-12 grade levels, college and adult financial literacy programs. These instructional strategies would make finance literacy investments deliver a greater impact as to how people actually learn and implement finance literacy concepts.
David Hyerle, Ed.D.
Founding Director
Thinking Foundation
144 Goose Pond Road
Lyme, NH 03768
Phone: 603-795-2757
Fax: 603-795-4620
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Dr. Gerald Lauber
Senior Advisor
90 Stirrup Lane
Syosset, NY 11791
Phone: 516-817-5131
Fax: 516-921-1142
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www.thinkingfoundation.org
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Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy |
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