Sphere Education Initiatives, The Virgina tech Center for Economic Education, and the Virgina Council on Economic Education are pleased to present this special one‐day professional learning event, Connecting the Dots: Economics, Virgina Standards, and Fostering Civil Discourse in Your Classroom, in Roanoke, Virgina, on September 30, 2025.
Join us for a day of immersive exploration of instructional strategies to build civil discourse in any social studies classroom. In the morning session, you will discover and explore strategies to build a culture and practice for facilitating meaningful conversations through viewpoint diverse civil discourse in your middle or high school classroom while also working to create pathways to empower students’ individual voices and gain valuable discussion strategies and techniques to manage the conversation. We will set the stage to analyze the nexus between civil discourse and economic principles to walk away with new ideas to encourage your students to think critically about our most pressing issues.
In the afternoon session, we will explore impactful strategies for incorporating economic standards into your social studies classes. With real‐world economic lessons and through the lenses of trade, protectionism and tariff policy, national debt, and globalization, we’ll unpack how key economic policies and decisions in history are shared and draw conclusions about their impact. From there, we will discover methods to inspire civil discourse and connect key economic concepts to historical, geographical, and cultural contexts across time. Through economic policies and real‐world challenges, we will explore ways to help students grapple with pressing issues such as, but nit limited to, immigration, tax policy, foreign policy, and how these challenges have, and continue to impact decision making.
Built especially for teachers and administrators, this free event offers the following benefits:
- 6 hours of professional development
- $75 stipend upon completion | Lunch Provided
- Free classroom‐ready resources
Cosponsored by Sphere Education Initiatives, the Virginia Tech Center for Economic Education, and the Virginia Council on Economic Education
