Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Part Two of my  Teach Me Econ podcast  conversation is now available. One thing James and I talked about in Part One of our conversation was using history as a ‘hook’ for getting more future social science teachers interested in economics. Then along comes a Weakonomics post about “ Eight economic things you don’t know about the pre-civil war south and slavery ” that provides a great place to start. In addition to an awesome “Primer for New Teachers of Economics” in the current issue (ungated version available on my personal website ), the Southern Economic Journal has a forthcoming article on “ Targeting Teaching Using ESPN 30 for 30 to Teach Economics ”.

In my last post , I walked through how I make videos to go with songs that I play as students enter class. A lot of times, I just play the songs/videos and then proceed with class; the songs are really just a way to get students thinking about how economics relates to many aspects of their lives that they may not be aware of (plus, the end of the music signals to students that class is about to start, which was a particularly big help when I was teaching the 500-seat section). But songs (and movie or TV clips) can also be useful springboards for in-class assignments. All of the resources out there that have suggestions for media clips in economics (like  Music for Econ ,  Movies for Econ , or  The Economics of Seinfeld ) will identify which economic concepts the clips address and have at least a short summary of what’s in the clip. A couple ( ABBA to Zeppelin and Dirk’s site ) also provide some specific follow-up questions that instructors could use in class. I thought...

Many readers of this blog are familiar with the idea of having music playing as students come into class each day. Just browsing through sites like ABBA to Zeppelin or Dirk Mateer’s media library will give you tons of ideas for songs with lyrics that relate to economic concepts. But for many of those songs, the economic references might be a little obscure. Sure, if you’re playing a song with the word “Money” in the title, students are going to get that there’s some sort of connection to economics but when you play a song like “Big Yellow Taxi” or “Soak Up the Sun”, chances are they’ll think you’re just playing random music and not realize it has anything to do with what they are learning. One way to make the connection clear is to use videos/animations that spell it out. This is why I’m a huge fan of Brian O’Roark’s Music for Econ videos. He created a bunch of flash files that show the lyrics for each song and also have images and text that highlight the economic concepts. When ...

Last month, I had a conversation with James Tierney for his Teach Me Econ podcast series. We ended up talking for over an hour so he broke it up into two parts and the first one is now posted . In this one, we talk a lot about economics at the K-12 level. The Council for Economic Education has a neat site, This Day in Economic History , that provides information on past events related to economics and personal finance (with related lesson plans for high school and Principles-level classes). Example: For February 6, 1919: "A five day strike involving around 60,000 Seattle union laborers, which basically shutdown the city, comes to a long awaited end." The AEA has posted webcasts of several sessions from the January meetings. They are a bit long but could be good discussion starters in any macro class. Antony Davies has a series of short videos covering a wide range of topics. These are ‘talking head’ lectures (i.e., just a video of a typical lecture) but focused and sho...