Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

In my post yesterday , I pointed out that economists are not trained in pedagogy. But I’ve also been thinking about the fact that most college professors, regardless of field, don’t really get any training in teaching. I wonder if college students are aware of that. It’s actually really weird when you think about it, given that we all know from the first day of grad school that if we want to go into academia, teaching will be part of the job. And yet, most graduate programs (at least in economics) don’t talk much about it. Fortunately, at most schools, teaching assistantships are one of the few sources of department funding so many grad students do get some experience teaching, and I think many departments have at least some kind of orientation or maybe a one-day training session to make sure their TAs aren’t completely inept. But that’s about it.* Students who are interested in teaching, and new faculty in general, are mostly left to develop their teaching skills on their own. Sure, t...

Here's a great example for talking about normal and inferior goods and/or income elasticities: Emek Basker has estimated income elasticities of revenue for Wal-Mart and Target and finds that Wal-Mart, overall, is inferior and Target is normal.

As I sat in the Course Design Institute the other day, it occurred to me that much of the language being used by the speakers would be completely foreign to many of my colleagues in economics. I’m not even talking about the vocabulary of educational technology (though that would likely be even more foreign) – I’m referring to the language of pedagogy. For example, I’m pretty sure that if I asked around my department, very few of my colleagues would know what Bloom’s taxonomy is. The recent focus on assessment at my University means that many faculty are now able to articulate specific learning outcomes for their classes but my impression is that coming up with these learning outcomes is seen as something we are required to do to satisfy the University, not as something that could actually stimulate deep thinking about our classes and help improve our teaching. This is not to say that my colleagues are not dedicated teachers; most have an earnest desire to teach well. But economists ar...

In addition to the Economics for Teachers class, my fall schedule includes a Micro Principles course for 500 students. I taught that course for the first time last fall and knew I wanted to make changes but rather than the usual between-semester tweaks, I have essentially ended up redesigning the entire course, inspired by (and contributing to) my adventure in Web 2.0. So it was serendipitous that I was able to attend SDSU’s Course Design Institute today. A few highlights: Andrew Milne defining teaching as “The purposeful structuring of experiences from which students cannot escape without learning.” I just love that. Finding out about SWoRD , a new tool for peer review of writing. I definitely want to find out more about that, especially since I’ll be teaching a writing class next spring in which I was planning to have the students do lots of peer review anyway. Tom Carey talking about ‘threshold concepts’: ideas that, once students really get them, open the way to an entirely diff...

It's rare that one can bring up sex in an economics class without sounding like a contrived attempt to grab students' interest but Daniel Hammermesh has a nice analysis of the porn tax proposed by California Assemblyman Charles Calderon that would be a good starting point for a class discussion.

I don't generally consider myself 'old' but when it comes to social networking and other aspects of Web 2.0, it's hard to deny that I am far behind the curve; not as behind the curve as many of my colleagues, but behind the curve nonetheless. And yet, I've become something of a Web 2.0 junkie in the last month, as I've been considering ways to incorporate blogs into my classes. Investigating blogs led me to podcasting, Second Life, de.li.cious, Twitter, wikis, and Facebook (which also led to Pandora and I'm sure that's not anywhere near the end) (and I know I should provide direct links to all those websites but really, do I need to?). There's so much information out there and every website leads me to other websites with even more great information. I've probably added 20 RSS feeds to my aggregator in the last five days and I'm trying to be more selective but this is one of the pitfalls for academics in particular - we're always looking ...

I have been trying to think of good, practical examples of marginal analysis that I can use with my students (unlike many economists I know, I don't think it makes any sense to explain to students that 'if the movie stinks, you should get up and leave' - it might be the utility-maximizing thing to do but it's just too big a jump from human nature to be useful for teaching). EconomistMom may have a more useful example - she points out that when the marginal benefits from something (in this case, straightening out one's teeth) accrue over a lifetime, those benefits are automatically higher for a kid simply because they have more lifetime left. Economistmom goes on to talk about the implications for social policy (e.g., spending money on education versus cutting inheritance taxes); this could get into some nuances about investment vs. consumption but I think her point is a powerful one.

One of my eternal frustrations is trying to explain what I do to those outside the field. Misconceptions about economics and economists abound, whether it is people thinking economics is only about interest rates or the stock market, or simply believing that economics requires a lot of math (although that belief is probably justified at the graduate level, the core economic principles that define the field certainly don’t require any math to understand). I’d probably be bothered less if I were a macroeconomist (since most laypeople equate economics with macro), but I think that even most macro folks would agree that depressingly few non-economists really understand that at its core, economics is about human behavior. Apparently, even the non-economist faculty at Harvard are struggling with this . In his blog, Greg Mankiw reprinted his email to the Harvard Crimson in which he explains that the intro Economics sequence does not belong in the “Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning” categ...

Sorry to put it so bluntly but there is simply nothing fun about grading, on the side of either student or professor. The only exception I can think of is that I have often been amused when grading student papers, though that’s not usually a good thing for the student. But my lament today is sparked by a recent story about a professor who has been denied tenure because he failed too many of his students (we’re talking 80-90 percent got Ds and Fs). I encourage you to read the article here because the story is not straightforward. The school in question serves a significant population of under-prepared students and one interpretation is that the professor simply refused to lower his standards. Another interpretation is that he did not do enough to help his students learn what they should have learned (though there seems to be evidence that he tried). It also sounds like the administration needs to figure out what it’s really asking of its faculty and I have to wonder how any professor g...

Just a quick follow-up to my post yesterday: I posed this question to an email list-serv of faculty in my college and more than one person echoed Suzanne’s comment, noting that we professors are often just as guilty of multi-tasking on our laptops during meetings as our students are during class. I can’t argue with that, and I know that my students are part of a generation that multi-tasks as easily as breathing. Still, I can’t help but feel there is a difference. When I find myself checking email during a meeting, it is after a conscious decision that whatever is being said is not worth my full attention and I do it with full knowledge that if I miss something, it’s my own fault (I also tend to use my laptop, if at all, in a position where others can’t see my screen easily). I hate to sound paternalistic but I am not all that convinced that my students are at that level of maturity and self-responsibility, particularly in my intro classes of 500 first- and second-year students. In a ...

Ian Ayres has a Freakonomics post today about students using laptops to surf the internet in class. He brings up a couple good points, including whether there is any good a priori argument against allowing students to multi-task. Certainly, I’d love to think that I am so brilliant and fascinating that students will avoid checking email for fear of missing one scintillating moment – but since I also live in the real world, I’m a bit more torn. The ‘student as customer’ model of college suggests that I should let them do whatever they want since they paid to be there (that is, if they want to ‘waste’ their money by surfing in class, that’s their problem). I have huge problems with that model as a teacher but the part of me that believes strongly in self-responsibility is more sympathetic. I think the one clear argument against allowing students to surf is the negative externality created when other students are distracted (given my own experience in meetings sitting next to people who w...

My timing for starting this blog is a little odd – this is the time of year when many professors (at least the ones interested in teaching) are swamped with grading and end-of-the-semester chaos, not starting new projects that require any amount of time investment. But I’m not actually teaching this semester, so the usual semester schedule doesn’t apply. I just hope people will want to procrastinate from their grading by reading this! Although my mini-leave is not teaching-related, I’m using this as an opportunity to get a jump-start on my fall classes; hence, this blog, since one of my fall classes is this Economics for Teachers course. I have been considering making it mandatory for my students in that class to read, and comment, on this blog. I hesitate to do so since a) I’m not sure how to grade such an ‘assignment’ and b) I worry that will put a lot of pressure on me to come up with blog entries that are actually worth their time. I’m hoping that by beginning this blog now, and ma...

I’m currently preparing to teach a course called Economics for Teachers for the first time this coming fall. I’ll explain much more about the course in future posts but the main idea is that it is for students who are planning to be high school teachers, perhaps in economics (though more likely another social science, like History). The idea for the class really started when I happened to see California ’s content standards for 12 th -grade economics . California is one of the leading states in the country when it comes to having well-developed and rigorous standards for its K-12 schools, and we were one of the first states to require all high school students to take a semester of economics, so I wasn’t surprised that we have standards that align fairly well with the voluntary National standards . But what struck me is that the standards really don’t look all that different from the learning objectives I lay out for my own principles classes. That led to me to wonder if studen...

My interest in helping teachers of economics at all levels is partly driven by my research, which focuses on K-12 education policy, primarily school finance and teacher labor markets. That means I study how schools are financed (for example, how much revenue comes from the state and how much from local communities, and how does that vary across schools), and I study why teachers do or don’t choose to teach in particular schools. In a larger sense, I am interested in what policies will lead to better schools, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. My research has made me acutely aware of the challenges facing public school teachers as well as the high variance in the quality of teacher preparation programs. Thus, creating the Economics for Teachers course and this blog are my small attempts to support, and perhaps contribute to the professional development of, at least one group of teachers. It is important for me to point out that I am first and foremost an economist...

An economist is someone who thinks in a particular way, who sees the world through the lens of economic principles. A teacher is someone who helps others to learn and to think. So a teacher of economics is someone who helps others to think like an economist. This requires both knowing how to think like an economist yourself, and knowing how to help others along this path. I started this blog to complement a course I’m teaching with the same name. Both the course and the blog are first and foremost about economics because, after all, you can’t teach what you don’t know. At the same time, just because you know something doesn’t mean you can teach it well. There are some things that teachers need to think about that are universal (like grading policies, classroom management, etc.) so teachers always have much to learn from other teachers, regardless of subject. A lot of posts on this blog are about my continual quest to be a better teacher, particularly my attempts to incorporate ‘W...