Jane Nicholson Helps Students Understand Dollars and Cents at Warren High School

Jane Nicholson realizes that students in Northside ISD need to understand how economics moves their world, to help them become better citizens. She maintains that all you have to do is listen to any newscast to realize how economics affects each of us.

She brings the world to the classroom, engaging her students in real-live adventures, such as the Stock Market Game. Students progress from knowing absolutely nothing to learning how to read a stock market report and make fairly accurate predictions of where a particular stock is going.

Due to her innovative approaches, the AP Economics program has grown from a single student taking the test and not passing it to 21 students taking the test and having a higher pass rate than any other school in the state. The AP Economics program has grown by 300 percent since she came to Warren three years ago.

She uses unique methods of teaching, such as obtaining permission to adapt the popular Monopoly game for studying Socialism and Communism. To engage her AP Economic students, she began movie nights to view and discuss films that illustrate economic lessons. She enthusiastically helps her students, hoping they can leave her classroom capable of being better citizens of the world.