Bank of Canada Museum honours two Canadian educators for innovation in the classroom

Ethan McDonagh and Andrew Leong have won the Bank of Canada Museum’s 2026 Award for Excellence in Teaching Economics. McDonagh is a Wilfrid Laurier University student completing a practicum at Northbrae Public School in London, Ontario. Leong teaches at Prince of Wales Secondary School in Vancouver, British Columbia.

They were chosen from nominations across Canada for lessons that helped students connect economics to contemporary issues. “What impressed the selection committee was how intentionally these lessons were designed for real-world understanding,” said Deputy Governor Sharon Kozicki. “Whether students were visualizing income distribution with beads or ‘travelling’ through global economies, the learning was active, inquiry-based and grounded in evidence. That’s what great economics education looks like.”

McDonagh designed an inquiry-based Grade 6 lesson that used coloured beads as data to explore income distribution, the value of labour and fairness. Working in pairs, students allocated 100 beads across 10 professions to show what they believed people should earn, then combined their results into a visual model. McDonagh then introduced gold beads representing actual Canadian income distribution for the same professions. Students compared their “should earn” models with the real data by graphing the two and calculating mean, median and mode. Using the poverty line as a reference point, students then had a rich discussion about basic needs and fairness. The class concluded with an $8 million redistribution challenge that asked students to defend their decisions.