Expanding Your Resources:
Tools for Teachers

What is a teacher tool?

Unlike an entire curriculum or series of lesson plans, these teacher tools are a collection of teacher-developed assessments, activities, handouts, and reflections. Their purpose is twofold: to provide teachers with supplemental home-buying readiness materials to use with their students in the classroom, and to model how home-buying materials can be developed. Because these tools were created by teachers, each tool’s voice reflects the persona and style of the teacher who developed it.

To aid in searching for appropriate tools, each tool is labeled with one of the following headings:

Assessment: helps determine what students already know about the home-buying process.

Activity: guides teachers through a particular classroom lesson.

Handout: is designed for duplication and use in classroom settings. For instance, some of the handouts are reproductions of students’ writings about various aspects of home-buying readiness.

Reflection: includes a teacher’s thoughts about her practice or recounts events that happened in the classroom.

In addition to identifying the nature of the material, each assessment, activity, and handout begins with a “Note to the teacher,” which provides teachers with directions about how to use the particular tool, possible modification, and overall guidance.

How are these tools meant to be used?

Teachers can adopt or adapt the materials in this section:

• Adopt: Many of the materials here, such as pre- and post-tests, math and literacy activities, and student writings, can be used as they are.21 Teachers should feel free to photocopy the tools, as long as they remember to credit the colleagues who developed the material.
  
  
• Adapt: Teachers can use the content or organization that another teacher has developed and make it specific to the needs and interests of certain students. For example, people in the Boston area might speak of “triple deckers,” or three-story houses, when considering first-time homeownership, while people in the southern states might talk about a double-wide trailer as a starter home. Local organizations that provide resources and information on home buying will differ from town to town and region to region, but teachers can borrow an approach and plug in the specifics relevant to their communities. Similarly, some of the language and grammar lessons may not be at the right level for students, but sample lessons here can inspire teachers to develop new home-buying readiness lessons and even new approaches to teaching about home buying.

In either case, whether teachers adopt or adapt the tools, the tools are an adjunct to, not a replacement for, the Fannie Mae Foundation ESL (English as a Second Language) and ABE (Adult Basic Education) curricula, How to Buy a Home in the United States and How to Buy Your Own Home.

Please keep in mind that these materials are written by teachers who are not experts on home buying but have taken the initiative to facilitate learning about the home-buying process as a content area covered within their classroom. The teachers have done their own inquiry and research in order to answer possible questions and concerns of their students. None of the material replaces legal counsel. The content of the materials is not necessarily endorsed by the Fannie Mae Foundation, nor by the institutions the teachers represent.

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