AdamSmithWorks Lesson Plans

This resource uses Twitter-length statements as a tool to better understand the complex text in Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and to practice the process of distilling complex ideas into concise statements to improve communication and understanding.

This lesson plan pairs quotations and original text from Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations with important founding-era American documents to build students' understanding of Smith, the American Founders, and the time at which they were active.

In this lesson, students read and discuss an essay by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North. They learn how Adam Smith’s ideas influenced the thinking of the Founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution. Next, the students work in groups to do an exercise that involves a more in-depth discussion of the economic features of the Constitution using new examples. 

Using a trivia game, students explore common myths and less well-known facts about Adam Smith. Background information, questions for discussion, and resources for further exploration are included.

The aim of this game is to "build" a production chain with sounds and actions. Each student provides a single step in the production chain. This lesson plan includes material appropriate for online teaching. 

This lesson helps students to understand the importance of trade-offs and constraints in the context of planning what to eat for the week. A paired reading from Wealth of Nations helps learners practice reading complex texts and extension exercises apply the concept learned. This lesson is appropriate for at-home learning.

Explore Adam Smith's pin factory, build mini sheds, and read Wealth of Nations to gain a better understanding of the division of labor.  Adjustments to this lesson plan to make it appropriate for online teaching are included.

This economics lesson is designed to be conversational and relies on materials in the home in order to accommodate parents thrust into an involuntary home learning environment as well as online educators. 

About greed? About morality?

Help students apply Adam Smith's ideas to contemporary issues. This lesson plan transfers well to online teaching.

Compare the pin factory from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to a modern potato chip factory described in a podcast. 

Explore with high school or introductory university students the way that the division of labor and changing market size have changed production over time.

How do we decide what to do for ourselves, and when to depend on others?

Does Adam Smith contradict himself in his two major works???


In this lesson, the students test Smith’s ideas on sympathy by playing a famous game in economics and ethics known as the Ultimatum Game. 

Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, and David Hume

Over an imaginary dinner, the three discuss their views regarding economics and the relationship between Great Britain and the American colonies.

How is an economy organized?
And what can Adam Smith- and a pizza- teach us?

Newly elected American President Elizabeth Montgomery faces an economic crisis.

The night before her State of the Union address, she is visited by the ghosts of Smith and John Maynard Keynes.

This lesson allows students to experience the benefits of trade that Adam Smith wrote about in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 

Students participate in a trade simulation that measures the variation in benefits received (utility) in a variety of rounds from no trade to free trade.  

This lesson builds on the lesson Trade for the Win!

Dig deeper into the benefits of free trade in contrast to protected trade using two videos to contrast 18th-century trade with modern times. The extension to this lesson shows graphically how tariffs decrease the overall wealth/well-being of society.