Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

[See previous posts for TBL basics , readiness assessments , team applications , peer evaluations/team grades , and student responses ] For those who have been following along with this series, I hope it's clear by now that TBL is pretty dramatically different from traditional chalk-and-talk. After teaching this way, it's actually really hard for me to stand up and 'lecture' in any class for more than about ten minutes. For those who are curious to find out more, the absolute best place to start is the Team-Based Learning website . The book by Michaelson, et al, is also a good starting place. To wrap up, I thought I'd address some of the questions that I think folks might have if you're considering adopting TBL... How do you get student buy-in? As I mentioned in my last post , I think it's crucial for students to understand why we are using TBL. One thing I do on the first day is ask the two questions in this article in The National Teaching and Lea...

Classes start tomorrow and I'm feeling oddly anxious. For some reason, I seem to be having a particularly hard time getting mentally into 'school mode' - I've been saying for the last week that it just doesn't feel like it's time to start classes yet. I think my problem is that we are starting a full week before Labor Day; the last few years, I think we started on Wednesday or Thursday so I had to be on campus for advising and such for a few days at the beginning of the week before starting classes and could get mentally prepared. Although I was on campus a few days last week, it just doesn't feel the same... I'm always a little bit nervous for my first classes of the semester, though the nerves generally go away as soon as I start talking. I remember feeling like I was almost going to throw up before walking into the 500-seater the first time. It helps when I already know students in the class; last spring, about two-thirds of my writing class were s...

[See previous posts for TBL basics , readiness assessments , team applications and peer evaluations/team grades ] At the end of every semester, I survey my students specifically about both PollEverywhere and TBL. The questions are largely adapted from a survey that SDSU's Instructional Technology Services asks all clicker-using faculty to give. I've summarized the responses from the last three semesters (click on the image to see full-size). Response was most positive (highest percentages agreeing or strongly agreeing with most of the statements) in Spring 2011, when I had two sections of 75 students each; the positive responses fall a little in the 2011-12 school year (not sure why) but over 80% still said TBL makes them more likely to attend class and to feel more involved in class, about two-thirds would choose a TBL section over another section of the same course that does not use TBL, and (most important to me) over three-quarters still said that they felt they gained...

I'll take a short break from my TBL series to share a couple of resources that you may find helpful if, like me, you're tweaking your fall classes and looking for some new material... Economics memes : I think anyone who is on Facebook, or receives email for that matter, has seen some version of various internet memes, which wikipedia defines as any idea that is propagated through the internet: "The idea may take the form of a hyperlink, video, picture, website, hashtag, or just a word or phrase... The meme may spread from person to person via social networks, blogs, direct email, news sources or other web-based services." The Economics memes site provides a collection of econ-related memes, as well as some information about how to use memes in your class. [Note: the Most Interesting Man in the World picture is actually from the Cengage Facebook page , and Jodi Beggs has a bunch of other  variations on the Most Interesting Man meme]. Div.E.Q. : Diversifying Econo...

[See previous posts for TBL basics , readiness assessments and team applications ] In this post, I'll go over how my students' course grades are calculated and the role of peer evaluations. I think the peer evaluations are probably the part of TBL that students are most worried about at the beginning of the semester, and the aspect that I get asked about the most by faculty. I want to say right off the bat that in the four semesters (eight classes) I've used TBL, I have not seen a single evaluation that appeared to be a student or team trying to 'game the system' (i.e., 'rewarding' a friend or 'punishing' someone unfairly). I've seen a few where students seemed to be not putting in much effort or thought but it has never caused someone's grade to be different than I thought made sense. Grade weights Many TBLers have the students themselves determine how much weight will be given to team and individual activities. The way Larry Michaels...

[For an overview of TBL, see this post ] In my last post, I described the Readiness Assessment process ; by the time students are done with the team RA, they are ready for the fun stuff: the team applications. For the next several class meetings, class time is almost entirely devoted to teams working on problems that require they think through and discuss the kind of data issues that empirical researchers routinely address. During the all-class discussion that follows the team discussions, my contribution tends to be limited to directing the discussion. I may spend a few minutes at the end of class tying together concepts but that's as close as I get to lecturing. TBL 'guidelines' say that good applications should satisfy the 4 S's: Significant problem, Same problem, Specific choice, Simultaneous report. Significant problem This seems sort of obvious - of course you want students to be working on problems that are 'significant', which I take to mean both r...