Scott Wolla

Scott Wolla is a lifelong economic educator and curriculum developer. Currently Scott is the Economic Education Officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He leads a team in developing economics curricula and providing professional development in the Eighth Federal Reserve District through workshops and trainings, and nationally at conferences and through an extensive webinar outreach program. He has a PhD in curriculum and instruction from St. Louis University, MA in economics for educators from the University of Delaware, MS from Bemidji State University, and BS from Minnesota State University Moorhead.

He has produced over 300 published teaching resources, including lessons, online learning modules, videos, articles, and podcasts. He is the voice and face of the popular Economic Lowdown podcast and video series, and he is a primary author and content editor of Page One Economics.

His research and pedagogy articles appear in The Journal of Economic Education, The American Economist, Review of Political Economy, Journal of Economics Teaching, Social Education, and Social Studies Research and Practice, and he has written chapters for books such as Innovations in Economic Education: Promising Practices for Teachers and Students K-16.

Scott is a leader on diversity-related issues in economic education. In 2018 he launched the award-winning St. Louis Fed Women in Economics Symposium to encourage collegiate women to pursue economics. And, as chair of Federal Reserve Education, in the weeks of unrest following the death of George Floyd, he led a series of webinars under the banner of Discussing Race in the Economics Classroom. The series broke new ground and set attendance records for the Federal Reserve System Economic Education Committee.

In 2019, seeing the monetary policy curriculum gap, he partnered with an economist at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to design a national public information campaign to inform instructors of the significant changes to policy and to support them with teaching resources as they made the transition to teaching new material. In doing so, they changed the way North-American instructors teach monetary policy. Their work was featured in The Economist, New York Times, and National Public Radio’s popular economics program and podcast, The Indicator.

Scott is currently a member of the American Economic Association Committee on Economic Education (AEACEE) and is on the writing team revising the Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics. He served on the Federal Reserve Economic Education Leads Committee from 2015–2022 and served as Chair of the Federal Reserve System Economic Education Committee in 2019–2020. He also served on the executive board of the National Association of Economic Educators (NAEE) from 2019–2022, and in 2020 NAEE awarded him the Bessie B. Moore Service Award in recognition for his service to the economic education community. In addition, he was awarded the 2018 St. Louis Fed President’s Award for Innovation for the Women in Economics Symposium.

Prior to the St. Louis Fed, Scott taught economics and history in Minnesota for fourteen years. During that time, he was the winner of numerous teaching awards, including the 3M Economic Educator Excellence Award (2006) and the Innovative Economic Educator Award (2003) by the Minnesota Council on Economic Education. Scott was recently appointed as a trustee at The Calvin Kazanjian Economics Foundation.

Scott currently teaches economics as an adjunct at Washington University in St. Louis.

The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, or the Federal Reserve System.