Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

A few opportunities that folks should know about... - Before the ASSA meetings in Chicago, on Thursday, January 5, there will be a workshop at Roosevelt University in Chicago on Advanced Pedagogy and Course Design : Cutting Edge Teaching Techniques and Strategies for Pluralistic Economists, run by Geoffrey Schneider, Bucknell University. The overview: "Most heterodox economists today end up working at teaching-oriented institutions. Thus, our success in the academy depends significantly on our ability to teach successfully. This workshop is structured for heterodox graduate students and younger faculty to give them a comprehensive background in advanced pedagogical techniques and strategies that will help them succeed in the classroom. Drawing on the latest pedagogical research, the workshop will cover constructing and meeting learning objectives, syllabus design, models for pluralistic teaching, active and collaborative learning techniques, and teaching controversial topics....

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...

This fall, my Economics for Teachers class is meeting once a week, in the evening. It wasn't my first choice for scheduling but as I re-vamped the class over the summer, I began to think that maybe this will actually be a good format. When I originally created the class, one thought I kicked around was that I would "teach" a lesson and then we would de-brief that lesson as a group (i.e., discuss why I chose to present the material in that way, what worked and what didn't, what might be stumbling blocks for students learning the material for the first time, etc.). In practice, I haven't done as much of that debriefing as I would like, for various reasons. One of those reasons was the timing of 75-minute class meetings - 75 minutes is really too short to teach a lesson AND do a thorough debriefing (plus all the administrative odds and ends that seem to take a few minutes at the beginning and end of each class) so either the debriefing would have to be cut short or I...