Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

The latest issue of the Journal of Economic Education has several must-read articles, written by the associate editors, providing advice about submitting your work to the different sections of the journal. If you are doing innovative things in your classroom, even if you are not doing controlled experiments or otherwise ‘proving’ effectiveness, you can still share what you’re doing in the Journal’s Instruction section. Personally, I usually find the articles in that section more useful for my actual teaching because they often provide descriptions of new activities or approaches, along with giving insight from the instructors about how things worked in the classroom. While on the subject, the Starting Point site is also a great place to share what you’re doing (and to find really useful descriptions of activities you might want to try yourself). Each of the modules focuses on a different pedagogical tool and has examples of assignments and activities using that tool in economics. ...

One of my sabbatical projects involves working with the San Diego Center for Economics Education to develop workshops for K-12 teachers related to economics and the Common Core State Standards. For any readers who are not familiar with the Common Core, here’s a super-quick summary: The Common Core is a set of standards for K-12 math and English language arts that have been adopted by almost every state, including California. There’s been a lot of hoopla about them in the media, partly because of the politics (contrary to what you may have heard, the Common Core standards were not forced on states by the Obama administration!), but for college instructors, the big thing you need to be aware of is the difference between the standards that most states previously had in place and the Common Core standards. To put it in simplest terms, the previous standards (at least in California, and most other states that I know of) focused primarily on CONTENT – i.e., what students are supposed to KNO...

Teaching position at Leiden University College : Leiden University College, The Hague is a liberal arts and science college of Leiden University. The University College experiment in the Netherlands began as an effort to raise the quality of education and teaching in Universities by importing and adapting the Liberal Arts and Science model. Note the deadline is April 15! Call for Papers: The National Economics Teaching Association is now accepting proposals for their fall conference, which will be November 6-7 in lovely San Diego. I occasionally post links on the blog’s Facebook page , which also get pushed to my Twitter feed [note that if you have ‘liked’ the FB page, you may need to adjust your settings to make sure that you actually see posts in your feed, or get notifications]. Last month, there was a story from Marketplace about movie ticket prices and revenue that would be great for talking about elasticity, and NPR had a behavioral econ story about technology and tipping ....