Teacher's Guide - The Curriculum Project

Tax (cont’d)Pre-teach: income (noun): the money that people receive from their salary and otherinvestments.Pairwork1. Put the students into pairs. Ask them to read the conversations betweenthe three sets of pairs and decide which system of income tax each pair istalking about. Also ask them to decide which person in each conversationthey agree with. Give them 10-15 minutes. When they have finished, putthe pairs into groups of four people and ask them to compare their answers.Do they agree?Then, ask a different pair to give you an answer for each of the threeconversations. Ask them why they have chosen that answer, and checkagreement with the rest of the class.Answers:Pair 1: ProgressivePair 2: ProportionalPair 3: RegressiveFinally, ask every student to raise their hand and vote on whether they agreewith the first or the second person in each conversation. Ask one or twostudents why they agree with that person in each case.Groupwork2. Put the students into groups of 3-5. Explain that each group are the leadersof a different political party in a democratic Burma (they need to choose aname for their party). They are preparing for an election in a few months,and must decide on their party’s income tax policy. They need to chooseeither Progressive, Proportional or Regressive taxation, and be able to explainclearly why they have chosen that policy. Everyone in the group needs toagree on the policy. If they do not agree, the members of that group shouldvote among themselves and the policy that receives the most votes wins.Explain that they must prepare a short presentation (2-3 minutes) to explainto the rest of the class why they have made that choice. Make sure thatthey understand that there is no ‘right answer’. This is about opinions. Givethem 20 minutes or so to complete this.Ask each group to make a presentation to the class, explaining which taxpolicy they have chosen, and why. Once each group has made apresentation, ask the students to vote individually (by raising their hand) onwhich group they would vote for (they cannot vote for their own group),based on how well they persuaded the class in their presentation. Forinstance, you can ask, ‘Raise your hand now to vote for Group 1!’. Recordthe number of votes for each group, and congratulate the winners.Ask the students vote individually (by raising their hand) on which system ofincome tax they think is the fairest, Progressive, Proportional or Regressive.Write the number of votes for each system on the board.The Curriculum Project ECONOMICS: an introduction - Teacher’s Guide28