Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Has anyone had experience with differentiated assignments? That is, where you specifically give students more than one option for an assignment and different options might be worth different grades (e.g., you have to do option A for a chance to earn an A or you can choose option B but then the highest grade you can get is a B)? I'm thinking about doing this because I have a couple of assignments where there is a possibility for some students to do something that is really a level above other students but I don't want to tell students they have to do that. For example, in my Economics for Teachers class , one of the projects is to develop a "mini-lesson" using an example from pop culture (music, movies, TV, etc.). Ideally, students would come up with their own example but there are also many sources that provide examples for them (some of which we will be specifically discussing in class). So I'm considering telling students that in order to earn an A, they m...

I survived the first week - 14 more to go! A brief summary of the week: The good: I was reminded many times this week that the vast majority of my students truly are good kids who just want to do well and learn something. Sadly, I have a tendency to forget that because I usually hear a lot more from students who are having problems (and are trying to avoid responsibility). Many students had questions about their clickers, or how the class is going to work, but every single one was polite and they all approached me with an attitude of "am I understanding this right?" rather than "why are you making us do this?". And even though the air conditioning does not seem to be working correctly in any of the classrooms, students were awake and engaged enough to speak up. In other words, so far, so good... The bad: I completely stressed myself out about the creation of the teams in my two sections of the data course. I had already planned to create the teams myself (rathe...