Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I think most folks have heard by now that the California State University system (in which I work) has announced the intention to prepare for fall classes to be primarily online. I have to say, I am sort of confused why everyone is making such a big deal about this - no matter what your own institution is saying, no instructor who cares about their own mental health (let alone their students) should be thinking we are going back to 'business as usual' in the fall. In my mind, the only sane thing to do is at least prepare  for the possibility of still teaching remotely. Fortunately, unlike this spring, we now have a lot more time for that preparation. Faculty developers across the country have been working overtime since March, and they aren't slowing down now; we are all trying to make sure we can offer our faculty the training and resources they will need to redesign fall courses for online or hybrid modalities. But one big difference between the training faculty needed ...

Since the end of last spring, I've been kicking around the idea of listing my writing class as a 'hybrid' class - i.e., a class that meets partially online. There are already several weeks in the course where I 'cancel' one of the class meetings because students are working on drafts and reviews and there isn't really anything for us to talk about as a group. So instead of having class, I tell students they can come meet with me individually to discuss their writing. There are also some class days where I feel like we don't really need to be meeting, that it would be just as easy to accomplish what we are doing online. So it wouldn't be that big a stretch to formally move to a hybrid structure where we meet face-to-face once a week and the other class 'meeting' is online. My department is also in the process of developing policies for handling the development of online (including hybrid) classes. We had some discussion last year when a collea...

A friend is starting a new teaching position this fall and I put together some suggested readings and resources for her and then realized that readers here might want find it useful too. So here are some articles and other resources that might be helpful for anyone teaching "large" econ classes (I put "large" in quotes because it really is relative - in my department, "large" means hundreds but at other schools, classes of 50 are considered "large"). I will readily admit a huge bias here as I started with the papers/projects I've personally been involved in! Buckles, S., G. Hoyt and J.Imazeki (2012), "Making the large-enrollment course interactive and engaging," in K. McGoldrick and G. Hoyt (eds), International Handbook on Teaching and Learning Economics , pp. 118-128. Hoyt, G., J. Imazeki, M. Kassis and D. Vera (2010), "Interactive large enrollment economics classes," in M. K. Salemi and W. B. Walstad (eds), Teaching ...

For the last three semesters, I've taught one or two sections of the Data Analysis course with 75 students in each section (yes, this is an upper-division course and yes, I think it's insane). I teach the class with team-based learning (which I realized I haven't written about much - will put that on the To Do list), so there is still a lot of class discussion; from my perspective, the main problem with having 150 students is how long it takes me to grade the exams and papers (yes, I give essay exams and assign two papers, though one of the papers is supposed to be only about four pages). When I originally decided to teach the class with TBL, it was partly because of the material, which lends itself quite well to the TBL format of having students work on complex application exercises. But it was also partly because I knew the classes would be so large and working in teams seemed like a good way to still have lots of student interaction and class discussion. However, thi...

OK, someone really needs to save me from myself... Just to make life more interesting, I've decided that it would be cool to teach this new data course using team-based learning (TBL). For those not familiar with TBL, the basic idea is that students are organized into 5-7 person teams that stay together through the entire semester and then as much of the course as possible is built around team activities. So now, on top of trying to figure out the basic content and topics for a course I've never taught before, I'm also trying to figure out how to structure assignments and assessments using a method I've never used before.* Fun! Actually, it's not quite as crazy as it sort of seems (at least, that's what I keep telling myself) - designing a team-based learning course basically requires backward design, which I was doing anyway , and in a TBL course, the instructor doesn't really do traditional lectures, which I really don't want to do. Instead, studen...

I should clarify something I said last week about how this data and statistics course I'm prepping isn't really a standard course: I do know there are lots of econ departments that offer an economic statistics course that is a step below econometrics. I guess what I was thinking is that the intention behind this course was specifically to give students tangible skills working with data, so there is supposed to be a heavy emphasis on finding and accessing economic data and using Excel to manipulate that data, rather than on formulas and statistical theory (which students presumably should have already had anyway, in a lower-division required statistics course). But my impression is that a lot of econ statistics courses for majors at other schools are really more stats courses, just with econ-related examples*. The interesting thing is that the Siegfried, et al, report ("The Status and Prospects of the Economics Major, JEE, Summer 1991) discusses this very situation (emph...

Given that I've never taught statistics, I eagerly read this Tomorrow's Professor post on Teaching What You Don't Know, which led me to Therese Huston's book by the same name. I haven't read all of it yet but I started with chapter 3, "Getting Ready" (yeah, I jumped ahead but Huston even says it's OK - the chapter starts with: "If you've just been assigned to teach a course that's outside your specialty and you're barely hanging on as it is..., you might have skipped directly to this chapter and bypassed everything else. That's fine."). The first thing that Huston suggests is 'planning backward': Fortunately, you can turn to the proven educational principle of backward design, also known as planning backward, to organize your class in a way that maximizes student learning and focuses your daily preparation. It's called "backward" design because you begin with the end product first: what do you want stud...

After a few weeks of catching up on referee reports and other projects that I should have done a long time ago but ignored because of classes, plus simply some much-needed piddling, I'm back in the teaching saddle and starting to design the new course I'll be teaching in the fall. Most economists (and, I assume, many other University professors) rarely actually purposely design courses. That is, a lot of professors start out as teaching assistants during graduate school, which usually means we just do whatever the professor we're working for tells us to do. When we move on to teaching our own classes, if it's a course for which we T.A.'ed, then we just follow whatever the professor we worked for did in that course. If it's a new course, we find other people who have taught the course and ask them for help, which amounts to getting their syllabus and maybe old assignments and exams. Once in a blue moon, someone might develop a course that hasn't really be...

Last semester sort of sucked and I'm still trying to figure out why. And what I mean by 'it sucked' is that I felt like my students were more confused than in the past, more whiny than in the past, and I was often more frustrated than in the past (and I should say that I am referring entirely to my principles class - my upper-division Econ for Teachers class was fine). I think that part of it was a general issue of students (and faculty and staff) being affected by the budget cuts. I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for students to keep straight which classes were canceled because of furloughs on any given day. But I also wondered if part of the issue with the Principles class in particular was because I was teaching it as a Tuesday/Thursday class when I had previously taught it as a Monday/Wednesday/Friday class. Aside from the fact that I had to tweak all my materials to make lectures flow OK, I just think 75 minutes is a long time for students to be s...

I find myself working on several projects this summer that involve writing about my teaching approach in the 500-seat Micro Principles class and I thought that readers here might be interested as well. I previously posted about how I use clickers and podcasts . Most economics professors have, by now, heard of Aplia but for anyone who hasn't, it is a company founded by Paul Romer that basically provides online assignments. They work with several publishers and if you use a textbook they partner with, you can get problem sets customized to that text and an online version of the book. The first semester I used Aplia, I assigned several of the problem sets that corresponded to the Mankiw text I use. Students tended to hate them, I think largely because I did not edit the questions carefully enough, to make them match what I do in class and the questions I ask on exams (I don't use the publisher-provided test bank). In subsequent semesters, I have assigned fewer problem sets, and...

I find myself working on several projects this summer that involve writing about my teaching approach in the 500-seat Micro Principles class and I thought that readers here might be interested as well. I previously posted about how I use clickers . One of the challenges for faculty who want to make their classes more interactive is that these activities generally take more time than simply lecturing on the same material. I absolutely believe that using clickers and other in-class activities lead students to a deeper understanding of ideas, and I have always taken more of a 'depth over breadth' approach anyway. Still, when I started using clickers, I knew that I would have to make some adjustments and cover even less material. One way I have made time in class is that I have stopped using class time for basic definitions. Instead, I require that students listen to short podcasts (no more than five minutes) that I record using Audacity , a freeware sound editor. The podcasts give...

I find myself working on several projects this summer that involve writing about my teaching approach in the 500-seat Micro Principles class and I thought that readers here might be interested as well. Over the next several days, I'll be posting about how I use clickers, Aplia and podcasts . I use clickers from eInstruction ; San Diego State decided a few years ago to standardize with one company across campus and I think it was a really good move (more information about clicker use at SDSU, including faculty and student feedback, and links to research on their effectiveness, can be found here ). As more and more faculty have adopted clickers, it has become easier for me to explain them to my students and to justify their cost. I embed clicker questions in the PowerPoint slides using eInstruction’s PowerPoint plug-in so the transition to questions is seamless during lectures. My policy is to make every class worth the same number of points (last semester, it was 3 points; previous ...

One of my teaching mantras is: "teaching is an iterative process". I repeat this to myself whenever things go badly in a class (or entire course), reminding myself that at least I can fix it (or try to fix it) the next time around. While this helps to keep me from feeling too terrible when things go wrong, it would obviously be nice to avoid things going badly in the first place. This is one of the many reasons why it's so nice to have a community to turn to when trying out new things - it's way less stressful to learn from other people's mistakes than your own. I've been thinking about this a lot lately because my big project for this winter break is getting things put together for a writing-intensive class for econ majors that I'll be teaching in the spring semester. As with the Economics for Teachers course that I taught in the fall, this is an entirely new course for my department and, since I can't seem to do anything the easy way, it isn't q...

As I've been working on bringing more Web 2.0 tools into my classes, I have frequently wondered how much is too much? I know that my students are supposedly 'digital natives' but I also know that they are not all as cutting-edge tech savvy as we old fogies sometimes assume. For my intro Principles class, students have to maneuver Blackboard (including using discussion boards), Aplia (a private third-party website that provides online problems and experiments for econ classes), an online textbook available through Aplia, clickers , PowerPoint slides and podcasts. In addition, I'm very likely going to be participating in a pilot program to capture my lectures so those will be on iTunes U as well (though students will certainly not be required to watch them - they will just be available as an extra resource). I'm also thinking about using Twitter as an option for students to get reminders and to ask questions in class (also not required but just an extra resource) but ...

Even before reading the comments from the first time I taught the 500-seater micro principles class, I was working on re-designing the class to cover less material. But of course, that requires thinking hard about what to drop. I have particularly struggled with the balance between material that I think students may need for upper-division classes (like cost curves) and material that I think students may not see anywhere else if they don't actually become econ majors (like externalities and public goods). I tend to prefer keeping the latter and dumping the former, since I strongly believe in the liberal arts, general education aspect of economics. I'm not as concerned that some business majors might not have a stellar grasp on average versus marginal costs, as I am that they won't understand there are good reasons for government intervention in certain markets. So I was really intrigued by a conversation I had yesterday with a friend who teaches in an econ department that...

As I was looking for more information about Clay Shirky , I found his Here Comes Everybody blog . A post from April contains a 'lightly edited transcription' of a speech in which Shirky mentions the resistance of many in the media world to the new Web 2.0 world: This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. When I read that, I immediately thought about how similar that sounds to much of the conversations in the teaching and learning community about the move toward more student-centered learning. Like traditional media folks, many teachers don't really understand this new world bec...

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'm still thinking about Steve Greenlaw's post about why some faculty are more willing than others to re-think and re-design their courses. As Steve points out in his comment to my previous post , the costs of fundamentally rethinking a course are really large. I'm particularly aware of this because for the last couple months, I have spent an absurd amount of time prepping my fall courses, and I know I'll spend an even more absurd amount this summer. Having this amount of time is a luxury that most of my colleagues do not have and it's really only available to me because a) I have tenure and b) I have established myself in my field of research in such a way that my colleagues are unlikely to consider me a 'slacker' even if I don't publish anything for awhile (which, at the rate I'm going, is entirely possible!).* On the other hand, there are lots of things I could have chosen to do with this time and I chose to spend it on my classes. But I digress...

Any professors who are truly interested in thinking more deeply about their teaching really should check out Steve Greenlaw's blog , if you haven't already. I always find that his posts make me think hard about my own teaching. In a recent post, Steve ponders why some faculty are more willing than others to make big changes to their courses. He observes that most faculty seem to see previous choices as constraints ; that is, once we have chosen to go down a particular path, it becomes difficult (or perceived as difficult) to switch to a different path. So, for example, once we have prepped a course, most of us keep teaching that course in the same way semester after semester. This leads to a certain resistance to major changes, like adopting new technologies. And yet, there are some faculty who embrace these changes - what makes them different? The typical economist answer is that anytime someone chooses to do something, it must be that they believe the benefits outweigh the ...

In addition to the Economics for Teachers class, my fall schedule includes a Micro Principles course for 500 students. I taught that course for the first time last fall and knew I wanted to make changes but rather than the usual between-semester tweaks, I have essentially ended up redesigning the entire course, inspired by (and contributing to) my adventure in Web 2.0. So it was serendipitous that I was able to attend SDSU’s Course Design Institute today. A few highlights: Andrew Milne defining teaching as “The purposeful structuring of experiences from which students cannot escape without learning.” I just love that. Finding out about SWoRD , a new tool for peer review of writing. I definitely want to find out more about that, especially since I’ll be teaching a writing class next spring in which I was planning to have the students do lots of peer review anyway. Tom Carey talking about ‘threshold concepts’: ideas that, once students really get them, open the way to an entirely diff...