Skip to main content

Teaching teaching

I've been plugging away with prepping my Economics for Teachers course, trying to figure out what is most important to cover, the best sequence in which to present certain ideas, and generally getting completely side-tracked as I find great articles and websites addressing different aspects of teaching economics. Since this is an entirely new course, I don't have many of the usual tools for guiding my decisions; that is, when I have prepped other courses for the first time, I have always had the syllabi of others who had taught the course before, as well as textbooks, instructor manuals and other aids from publishers. But in this case, the only such help I have is William Becker's syllabus for a Teaching Economics to Undergraduates course aimed at econ grad students. That's certainly been helpful but only up to a point, since I'll be teaching undergrads who will someday be teaching high school students and who are, for the most part, not even econ majors. So basically, I'm making a lot of this up as I go along.

But I had a wonderful revelation the other day that I think is going to prove invaluable. This is a course about teaching, and all of these decisions I need to make about what to cover, how to assess, when to schedule different things, etc., these decisions are, to a certain degree, part of the teaching process. So why don't I let my students make some of these decisions as part of their learning process? So, for example, one of their assignments will be a group project but instead of me trying to decide what would be the best way to structure the project and how to grade it, I'm going to let my students decide, after they read a couple articles on organizing groupwork and we have a class discussion of the relevant issues for teachers (I have to say that I'm particularly excited about this idea because I've always had a hard time with grading group work since, like most over-achieving academics, I was always one of those students who hated group projects because I was the one who ended up doing most of the work and resenting free-riding group members. Thus, I now have a really hard time figuring out how to assign grades in a way that seems fair to everyone) (interestingly, while I was working on writing this post, The Teaching Professor posted an entry about Why Students Hate Groups).

I'm not sure how far I can carry this and a part of me is not entirely comfortable with starting the semester with what amounts to an incomplete syllabus. But I also can see that, for me, this is a way to ease into a more evolved, student-centered style of teaching. More on that in future posts...
Labels:

Comments

  1. DispersemosJuly 2, 2008 at 8:31 AM

    I think it's a fantastic idea. I'm trying to build up the courage to do more of this with my own classes, but I teach undergrads exclusively, and past experience with allowing them to choose topics for in-class discussion, research papers and group projects have not produced good results.

    As I begin to think about my own syllabi for fall term, I'm reading some good sources on how to approach course goals and student-centered learning:

    Bain, Ken. What the Best College Teachers Do. Harvard University Press, 2004.

    O'Brien, Judith Grunert, Barbara J. Millis, and Margaret W. Cohen. The Course Syllabus: A Learning-Centered Approach. Jossey-Bass, 2008.

    Nilson, Linda B. The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course. Jossey-Bass, 2007.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jennifer ImazekiJuly 4, 2008 at 8:35 AM

    Thanks for the suggestions. Bain's book is one of my favorites and I'm looking forward to checking out the others!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments that contribute to the discussion are always welcome! Please note that spammy comments whose only purpose seems to be to direct traffic to a commercial site will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

When is an exam "too hard"?

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu
3 comments
Read more

What was your high school economics experience like?

As I mentioned in my last post , I am asking my Econ for Teachers students to reflect on their reading by responding to discussion prompts. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to share my thoughts on those issues here and see if anyone wants to chime in. For this week, the students were asked to read the California and national content standards , an article by Mark Schug and others about why social science teachers dread teaching economics and how to overcome the dread, an article by William Walstad on the importance of economics for understanding the world around us and making better personal decisions (with some evidence on the dismal state of economic literacy in this country), and another article by Walstad on the status of economic education in high schools (full citations below). The reflection prompt asks the students to then answer the following questions: What was your high school econ experience like? What do you remember most from that class? How do
2 comments
Read more

THE podcast on Implicit Bias

I keep telling myself I need to get back to blogging but, well, it's been a long pandemic... But I guess this is as good an excuse as any to post something: I am Bonni Stachowiak's guest on the latest episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, talking about implicit bias and how it can impact our teaching.  Doing the interview with Bonni (which was actually recorded a couple months ago) was a lot of fun. Listening to it now, I also realize how far I have come from the instructor I was when I started this blog over a decade ago. I've been away from the blog so long that I should probably spell this out: my current title is Associate Vice President for Faculty and Staff Diversity and I have responsibility for all professional learning and development related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as inclusive faculty and staff recruitment, and unit-level diversity planning. But I often say that in a lot of ways, I have no business being in this position - I've ne
Post a Comment
Read more