Refining Lesson 2.3: Strengthening Firm Decision-Making
Lesson 2.3: An Introduction to Firms has been a favorite. We’ve heard and seen that students are engaged, energy is high, and student firms successfully calculate costs, revenue, and profit.
Where We Saw Room to Grow
As we observed classrooms, taught the lesson ourselves, and reflected on student outcomes, we noticed something important. While students could compute profit accurately, they weren’t consistently thinking like firms before or during production.
Many groups jumped into hat-making without first weighing the costs and benefits of each hat option. The simulation was functioning, but it wasn’t fully achieving its learning objective. Students weren’t able to consistently explain how firms make decisions.
What We Changed
We streamlined the materials to reduce preparation time and simplify the supplies required.
More importantly, we strengthened the decision-making phase before production begins. Students now analyze the costs and benefits of producing each type of hat and must make a deliberate firm-level choice before the simulation starts.
We also shortened production time to allow for a deeper debrief. The revised debrief pushes students to reflect and reconsider:
- Which hats did your firm choose to produce? Now that you have more information, would you have changed your decision? Explain.
- How did your firm apply the cost-benefit principle when making production decisions?
- Assuming everything else stayed the same, if the price of paper had increased to $4, what would your profit be? How would your decision making as a firm have changed?
Why It Matters
Engagement alone isn’t the goal. We want students practicing economic reasoning throughout the lesson.
Even when a lesson is popular, we continue refining it to maximize instructional time, deepen economic thinking, and ensure students are truly learning to think like economists.
We'd love to hear how these changes work for your students. Please share your thoughts using the feedback form.