Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

In the past, I have regularly used Discussion Boards (within the Blackboard LMS) to have students post reflections or questions related to assigned readings. But I've really only used the Discussion Board tool because there was no better alternative; I've never been a big fan of the interface. The threads just seem clunky and I don't think students actually read what other students post unless I specifically assign them to do so. So now that my university has updated to Blackboard 9, which has blogs, wikis and journals, I'm considering using one or more of these options instead. While wikis are specifically for collaborative creation of a common product, blogs and journals allow students to write individual posts or comments. From what I can tell, the main difference between Blackboard's blogs and journals seems to be that journals are intended to be private; students write entries that are only visible to the instructor (although there is an option to make the e...

We discussed supply and demand in my Econ for Teachers class this week. This is usually one of my favorite weeks in this class because we do an in-class double-oral auction , which I don't get to do in principles anymore (since I'm not brave enough to try it with 500 students) - I use Aplia for that class instead and while it's better than not doing it at all, it's just not the same. I love watching the students get into their buyer and seller roles. There is always a few who surprise me, some students that I think of as being relatively quiet but they end up being enthusiastic negotiators. And students always tell me at the end of the semester how memorable the auction is for them. But as I was preparing the materials for class, it dawned on me that no where in the California content standards, or in the national standards, are supply and demand curves mentioned. That is, standard 12.2.2 of the California standards says, "Discuss the effects of changes in supply...

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...

This morning's Dilbert was perfectly timed as I was in the middle of trying to figure out the grade weights for my fall Econ for Teachers class and as usual, having a huge mental debate over how much weight to give 'participation'. A couple of Teaching Professor posts this summer hit on the same issue so it's already been at the back of my brain. In my data analysis course, participation is rolled into the team grades and that takes care of it; I've found that students have a strong tendency to 'punish' their peers for low participation by giving them low peer evaluation scores. But with the Econ for Teachers class, I do a lot of formative-type assessments that I'm not going to "grade" for content (e.g., student reactions to readings where I ask them to relate the reading to something in their own experience), so I have to decide how much credit to give students simply for completion. I want students to take those assignments seriously and th...

For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking about next semester (yeah, I've got issues...). Since this is my first semester teaching the data class, or using TBL, of course I have a list of stuff that I want to change next time around. What I was thinking about this morning was how to create the groups. This fall, I created the teams by asking students for some basic information and then I just tried to make sure each team had a good mix of students (i.e., mix of good and not-so-good grades, gender, econ versus business interests, etc.). For the most part, it's worked out well but I'm wondering if there's a better way. In my Econ for Teachers class , they have group projects (but not semester-long teams) and I did an exercise where I asked students to brainstorm what characteristics they would want in their group members. Their responses boiled down to four main factors: subject knowledge (this is a course of mostly social science majors with a handful of econ ma...

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...

It isn't often that I talk about macro but I had just finished reading a lesson plan on fiscal policy from students in my Econ for Teachers class when I saw this post from tutor2u about this chart: This struck me as a great way to introduce the topic of fiscal policy, as it makes a strong visual statement about the many policy tools that a country could use. I can imagine a great discussion about what would lead different countries to rely on different combinations of tools.

In Economics for Teachers, I finally got around to teaching some macro. As a microeconomist through and through, I must admit I haven't exactly been looking forward to this part of the semester - it's not that I don't find macro kind of interesting (especially these days), but I haven't taught it in a very long time. I'm pretty sure I bored the heck out of my class for most of Monday and Wednesday but the one bright spot was using a clip from Mary Poppins to motivate our discussion of the banking system. I used the scene that includes the song "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank" in which the Chairman of the Bank, and Mr. Banks, try to explain to the children that by investing Michael's tuppence, he can be part of "railways through Africa; dams across the Nile; fleets of ocean greyhounds; majestic, self-amortizing canals; plantations of ripening tea". In the end, Michael causes a run on the bank when he starts yelling 'give me back my money' to...

No, I'm not talking about the bailout debacle (though this might be the only remotely-econ-related blog that isn't talking about that today; if you're looking for info on the financial crisis, I highly recommend Mark Thoma's Economist's View ). No, I'm just talking about teaching. I've been feeling sort of burned out and seriously in need of a vacation but today, in particular, was one of those days where I really didn't feel like getting out of bed, let alone getting in front of a classroom. I was crabby from the moment I got to campus and had to wait for my plain ol' coffee at the Starbucks in the student union (why do they even bother having an extra carafe set up if they wait until BOTH are empty before brewing more?). I was even crabbier after my principles class where, while going over the exam they took on Friday, I realized that I had once again given them a bad question (at least this time, the question itself made sense; I just had inadver...

The first thing I had students do in my Economics for Teachers course is look over California's content standards in economics (the California Council on Economic Education has a great booklet that pulls out the econ-specific standards for every grade), and compare them to the Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics . There were two reactions from my students I found particularly noteworthy. The first, which I sort of expected, was many commented that they did not learn this stuff in high school, although almost all of them went to high school in California after the standards were adopted. While they said that they did talk about some of the topics, most agreed that they didn't really see most of the content until they got to college. Of course, that is exactly what led me to create this class in the first place, but it was nice to have my perceived need for the class reinforced. The other reaction that I found interesting was that several students asked about the...

(Note:this post is primarily intended for my students but may be useful to anyone else who is relatively new to blogs) If you have spent any time on the web, you have probably seen this icon, which signifies an RSS feed. Subscribing to feeds means that you don't have to actually visit sites to get newly-published information; instead, the content is sent to you. For the Economics for Teachers class, in which every student will be publishing a blog, the easiest way to keep up with all the posts is through subscribing to the feeds. The following Common Craft video provides a simple explanation of how feeds work: The RSS feed for this blog is at the top of the right-hand sidebar. As the video points out, you will need a feedreader for collecting all your feeds. Google Reader is one of the more popular web-based readers and if you already have a gmail account, this is probably the easiest way to go. Bloglines is another web...

One of my reasons for starting this blog was to get some experience with blogging before the fall, when I will be having some of my students blog. Originally, I had been thinking of incorporating blogs into my 500-seater but I have decided to hold off on that until I've seen how it works in a smaller class first (students in the big class will contribute to discussion boards on Blackboard instead, which will allow me to track their posts and comments more easily than just free-for-all blogs). However, my upper-division Economics for Teachers class, which will hopefully be no more than 40 students, will be required to set up blogs. I will also encourage them to read and comment on this blog - I am not sure whether their presence will affect what I choose to write but that will be an experiment too. Over the next few weeks, I will be posting a few entries specifically for my students so to everyone else, please bear with me (or maybe they'll be helpful to you too!). I'd cert...

Thanks to the Problogger Social Media Love-in , I have a number of new friends on Twitter and other socialnetworking sites (hello new friends!). As I've been exploring the blogs of all these new friends, I'm surprised by how many money-oriented and personal-finance-related blogs there are out there (yes, I realize that this is a sample selection issue since I'm sure that these folks are more likely than others to have been interested in connecting with an economist, but still...). Seeing all these blogs strikes me as particularly great given a recent Freakonomics post in which Dubner asks whether we are a nation of financial illiterates and the answer is a pretty scary yes. But I also have to say that the Freakonomics post raised an old issue for me about whether we should be teaching 'personal finance' in schools. In many places, high school economics courses already ARE courses more in personal finance than real economics. That is probably not so much a consciou...

Tyler Cowen points to a story about a student in Pittsburgh, Seth Weidman, who independently taught AP economics to his classmates . Aside from the obvious awesomeness of this kid's initiative, this story was striking to me for the important lessons it contains for all teachers of economics: - One of the keys to teaching economics well is making it relevant: "Seth developed a philosophy that if students weren't paying attention, it was because he wasn't making the class interesting enough. So he concocted ways to illustrate economic concepts from the real world ofhigh school. Eva remembered the time he explained the concept of a positive externality using an example of complimenting a girl in the hallway." - The best way to learn something is to teach it: "There's no doubt that it was a lot of work, said Seth, but it wasn't all altruistic: not only was it fun to teach the class, but he also gained a deeper understanding of economics. "If you can...

I've been plugging away with prepping my Economics for Teachers course, trying to figure out what is most important to cover, the best sequence in which to present certain ideas, and generally getting completely side-tracked as I find great articles and websites addressing different aspects of teaching economics. Since this is an entirely new course, I don't have many of the usual tools for guiding my decisions; that is, when I have prepped other courses for the first time, I have always had the syllabi of others who had taught the course before, as well as textbooks, instructor manuals and other aids from publishers. But in this case, the only such help I have is William Becker's syllabus for a Teaching Economics to Undergraduates course aimed at econ grad students. That's certainly been helpful but only up to a point, since I'll be teaching undergrads who will someday be teaching high school students and who are, for the most part, not even econ majors. So basic...

I just came across this online Handbook for Economics Lecturers from the Economics Network of the UK's Higher Education Academy. It's aimed at university instructors but could be useful for high school economics teachers as well (and although I haven't explored it too much yet, the Economics Network's homepage also looks like a gateway to a lot of other useful links).

The other day, when I asked where is the demand for better teachers , I was mainly thinking about college teaching. But what’s really disturbing is to consider whether one might ask the same question about K-12 teaching. Obviously, there are entire departments devoted to training K-12 teachers so I’m not talking about the demand for training versus no training, as with grad students who go on to be professors, but there is a lot of complaining out there in the world about the quality of that training. To be fair, I do research in education policy and teacher labor markets so I probably hear more of such complaining than the average person, but there is no doubt that many people perceive the K-12 teaching force to include both amazing individuals and some major duds. But given that K-12 teaching does require at least a year of very specialized training, how does anyone even get to a K-12 classroom without really knowing how to teach? One reason might be that, other than meeting the basi...

My timing for starting this blog is a little odd – this is the time of year when many professors (at least the ones interested in teaching) are swamped with grading and end-of-the-semester chaos, not starting new projects that require any amount of time investment. But I’m not actually teaching this semester, so the usual semester schedule doesn’t apply. I just hope people will want to procrastinate from their grading by reading this! Although my mini-leave is not teaching-related, I’m using this as an opportunity to get a jump-start on my fall classes; hence, this blog, since one of my fall classes is this Economics for Teachers course. I have been considering making it mandatory for my students in that class to read, and comment, on this blog. I hesitate to do so since a) I’m not sure how to grade such an ‘assignment’ and b) I worry that will put a lot of pressure on me to come up with blog entries that are actually worth their time. I’m hoping that by beginning this blog now, and ma...

I’m currently preparing to teach a course called Economics for Teachers for the first time this coming fall. I’ll explain much more about the course in future posts but the main idea is that it is for students who are planning to be high school teachers, perhaps in economics (though more likely another social science, like History). The idea for the class really started when I happened to see California ’s content standards for 12 th -grade economics . California is one of the leading states in the country when it comes to having well-developed and rigorous standards for its K-12 schools, and we were one of the first states to require all high school students to take a semester of economics, so I wasn’t surprised that we have standards that align fairly well with the voluntary National standards . But what struck me is that the standards really don’t look all that different from the learning objectives I lay out for my own principles classes. That led to me to wonder if studen...