AdamSmithWorks Lesson Plans

Use Twitter-length statements as a tool to better understand the complex text about free trade in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and to practice the process of distilling complex ideas into concise statements to improve communication and understanding.

Explore a pin factory with Adam Smith and contemplate the creation of the humble pencil to understand better how markets and prices help people coordinate their economic activity. 

Use Twitter-length statements as a tool to better understand the invisible hand passage in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and to practice the process of distilling complex ideas into concise statements to improve communication and understanding.

In the lesson, the instructor will read passages from Smith and display corresponding maps. Students will investigate each map and discuss how the maps & passages relate to concepts like specialization, scarcity, interdependence, and trade.

 In this activity, students create timelines of scientific innovations and historical events during the life of Smith. The lesson highlights economic concepts and could also be a great introductory activity for a unit on Technology & Innovation, or Entrepreneurship. 

Explore the division of labor and specialization with high school or introductory university students by putting students to work in their own (pipe cleaner) pin factory.

High School teachers who teach Adam Smith are already going beyond the requirements. Use the Adam Smith Escape Room to take your students beyond the ordinary as well. Students will explore big questions from Wealth of Nations and think about what inspires economists to study the world around them.

Use Twitter-length statements as a tool to better understand the complex text about the division of labor in Adam Smith’s 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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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

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.  

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. 

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.  

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.

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.