Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I'm "teaching" a new "class" this semester - the quotes are because the "class" is a faculty seminar and it's really more like I'm 'facilitating' than 'teaching'. But the work I'm putting into it feels very much like prepping a course and I had forgotten how much work this is! The seminar is on "High-Impact Teaching", which is really just a term I made up, mostly to appeal to those in my administration who are all about High-Impact Practices, and which I am using to encompass scholarly teaching and using evidence-based pedagogy (if anyone is interested, the details are here ). Anyway, the first meeting was Thursday and in preparation, the participants were asked to complete the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) and the Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI). I thought I'd share these tools with you all because I think these are both really interesting tools for thinking about who you are as a teacher. The items...

If you've read my last few posts about PollEverywhere with skepticism (or skipped them entirely) because you just can't imagine ever letting students use their cell phones in class, my question for you is WHY NOT? Or more specifically, is your aversion to cell phones driven by concerns about helping good students or reining in bad students? By 'good' and 'bad', I'm not talking about those who get good and bad grades; I'm talking about those who care about learning, who want to be there, and those who don't. I've been thinking a lot lately about how much I tend to focus on the latter group, and how often I tend to forget about the former group, and how backward that is... "Students will cheat" For example, I know that for some teachers, the biggest problem with a service like PollEverywhere is concerns that students will use their phones to cheat. At a meeting to discuss options for a new clicker vendor for our campus, a few facult...

I've always been a semi-early adopter of technology. I'm not a fanatic about it; I'm just sort of fascinated by the internet, by the ability we now have to reach people we never could in the past, and I like playing around with stuff. Back in college, I would 'chat' with friends via the VAX (I think that's what it was called), and in grad school I learned some html so I could create a personal webpage with lots of random stuff on it. I was actually excited when our campus started using Blackboard because it was easier to post my class stuff there than on the webpages I created on my own. And as the number of tech and web-based communication tools has exploded, I've explored a bunch of them, as I've written about here a lot. But even though I think technology is a wonderful thing, when it comes to teaching, I don't think I use technology just for technology's sake. Rather, I'd say that when I'm faced with a problem, I tend to look to te...

Just to follow up on my earlier post about grading participation : I decided that contract grading was going a bit far and instead will have a chunk of the semester grade that is based largely on completing assignments, attending class and otherwise engaging in the behaviors that should lead students to do better on their other assignments anyway. Taking a cue from Lisa Lane , I'm calling that portion "Class Contribution" and I've purposely left it vague how that portion is scored. What I say in the syllabus is that this will be determined in part by the peer evaluations (from their teams), completion of all assignments and participation in class, which I will track with their responses to clicker questions. Specifically, the syllabus says: Attendance and due dates: The team nature of this class requires you to be in class and to do your part as a member of your Team. This includes completing the individual component of Applications and submitting responses to clic...

By now, a lot of academics (or at least academic economists) have heard about Scott Carrell and James West's paper on professor quality . They use data from the Air Force Academy (where students are randomly assigned to core courses and take common exams) and find that the 'value-added' of professors in intro courses is both positively correlated with student evaluations and negatively correlated with 'value-added' in follow-on courses (which the authors talk about as evidence of 'deep learning'). Basically, professors who seem to be better at inducing 'deep learning' in their intro students are also more likely to get lower evaluations from those students. On the one hand, I have to say that this feels kind of validating for people like me - that is, I care a lot about helping my students learn to think critically and I think I put a lot of effort into trying to foster deep learning, rather than allowing my students to just memorize stuff, but I ...

At the TIP workshop , one of the first activities was for us to discuss what we consider the most important thing professors can do to facilitate student learning (which we then had to demonstrate through some sort of presentation but that's a whole 'nother story). In my group, we started out with an interesting discussion about whether 'being organized' is the most important thing a professor can do to facilitate student learning. I argued that there are certain things that are sort of a baseline for student learning - to me, being organized and knowing what you're talking about are prerequisites for stepping into any classroom. And I do think that if you aren't organized, students won't be able to learn. But I think of being organized as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for student learning. Plenty of people deliver content in an organized way; that does not mean students will learn. My group agreed on 'making material relevant' as the id...

My department is beginning to talk about writing new questions for our teaching evaluations. One of my colleagues wants to only ask 'objective' questions, such as whether professors are in their office when they say they will be, whether they were on time (or even present) for classes, etc. His reasoning is that faculty can control whether they are doing a "professional" job (his word, not mine) but we can't control what our students do. As he put it (and I quote): "The problem with measuring how much students are learning is that there is an implicit assumption that we are responsible for how much they learn. The responsibility is both ours and theirs, yet we don't ask questions about how responsible they are being." On one level, I can understand where he's coming from. On the other hand, my personal philosophy was pretty much summed up by Scott at Dangerously Irrelevant in a recent post that was succinct but powerful: Two problematic beliefs ...

I often tell my students that I believe part of my job is to help them develop the 'soft skills' like time management and responsibility that they will need in order to be successful in the workplace. But it has occurred to me that this may not mean much when students don't see any connection between school and life after graduation. I don't know why they don't but I simply can't imagine that they would ever treat a job the way they treat their classes. Case in point: in my writing class, students were supposed to read a classmate's paper and give feedback by midnight on Friday, so the writers could revise and submit final drafts by 4pm today (Sunday). Three students did not post their feedback AT ALL, leaving their classmates high and dry. I was at a bit of a loss - I had thought the peer pressure of being responsible to a classmate would be strong enough that I hadn't actually figured out what to do if they flaked out completely. That is, there's ...

I've been thinking about an image I have in my head of the "perfect professor". This perfect professor inspires all her students, leading them to think critically and become lifelong learners. Her lectures are always so clear and interesting that students never fall asleep, read newspapers, surf the web or text their friends in class (except to comment on something class-related, of course). The perfect professor's students are never grade-grubbers because she has inspired them to want to learn for learning's sake. She manages to convey how much she cares about her students without giving them the impression that she is a pushover. The perfect professor never gets emails from students complaining that her grading is unfair because her students never get confused about deadlines and/or they understand the exact repercussions of missed assignments. Her classes are challenging, but not impossible, in that way that even the B and C students feel like they are learning...

I've spent a lot of time this week writing exams. I give my Principles students three midterms, with the third one falling on the next-to-last class (which would be this coming Wednesday). Then I use the last class meeting to review everything from the semester in preparation for the cumulative final; in other words, I try to remind them of everything they've learned, which I hate to say, usually ends up being sort of a laundry list of concepts. I'm still working on a better way to review "everything"... I know that many of my students hate my exams - I suppose that they would say I try to "trick" them. That's because for many questions, I purposely try to make one of the wrong answers something that will seem right to students who only have a superficial understanding of the material. I talk to a lot of students who do worse on my exams than they thought and when they see the correct answers, they say, "Oh, that's the other answer I was thi...

[This is the email I sent to my students today, with my solution to the attendance problem I wrote about last week . Coincidentally, InsideHigherEd has an article today on clickers that summarizes some of the issues with using them.] Dear students, As I mentioned on Friday, I have been considering how to re-structure the points for the clicker questions. The failure of the clickers this past Wednesday, the number of people who left at that point, and the relative quiet of the ensuing class, made me realize that by attaching points to clicker questions, I may have been doing you all a disservice. I don't want anyone to feel that they "have" to come to class just to get points. Obviously, I would hope that my lectures are sufficiently engaging and useful that you would see the benefit of attendance but I have always believed in treating my students as adults and as we discussed at length at the beginning of the semester, everything in life is a choice, including coming to ...

For some reason, I wasn't able to use the clickers yesterday. CPS for PowerPoint seemed to be working but when I started the slideshow, I got an error I'd never seen before. Since it didn't go away when I closed and re-started the application, I decided to just get on with the lecture. But I did announce that the clickers weren't working and if anyone wanted to leave (since I knew that some students would), to please leave now so as not to disturb everyone else later. Well, quite a few more students left than I expected (seriously, about one quarter to one third). There were still probably about 250 students who stayed but it's amazing how empty a 500-seat classroom feels when it's only half full! But what was really striking was how wonderfully quiet the rest of the class was! With over 400 students, there is always a lot of chatter around the room - I try not to let it get too bad but there's only so much I can do so there's always a low-level buzz i...

(This is the email I sent to my Principles students, all 500 of them, this week) Welcome to Economics 102, Principles of Microeconomics! I’m looking forward to seeing you all in class next Wednesday and hope that we will have a productive semester together. There are just a couple things I wanted you to know/think about before our first class meeting. The course website on Blackboard is now available and I encourage you to take a look around; in particular, please look over the syllabus before our first meeting (it is posted under “Course Information”). We will discuss the syllabus in class but I will not have copies so feel free to get it off the website and bring it with you. If you are not familiar with Blackboard, go to https://blackboard.sdsu.edu/ to log in. Your username should be your Red ID and your password is your University PIN (i.e., the same information you use for WebPortal). If you do not know your Red ID number or you want to change your University PIN, contact SDSU e-...

Sorry to put it so bluntly but there is simply nothing fun about grading, on the side of either student or professor. The only exception I can think of is that I have often been amused when grading student papers, though that’s not usually a good thing for the student. But my lament today is sparked by a recent story about a professor who has been denied tenure because he failed too many of his students (we’re talking 80-90 percent got Ds and Fs). I encourage you to read the article here because the story is not straightforward. The school in question serves a significant population of under-prepared students and one interpretation is that the professor simply refused to lower his standards. Another interpretation is that he did not do enough to help his students learn what they should have learned (though there seems to be evidence that he tried). It also sounds like the administration needs to figure out what it’s really asking of its faculty and I have to wonder how any professor g...