Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

For anyone who was wondering: yes, I'm still alive! But the last few months have certainly been interesting! In July, I was asked to be the Director of our Center for Teaching and Learning, so August was mostly a blur of meetings (and extreme stress!) as I tried to get up to speed and ready for the start of the school year. It's taken me this long to feel like I have some clue about what I'm doing (or at least, to feel like I can fake having a clue with reasonable credibility :-)). It's definitely been an adjustment. The position is sort of halfway between administration and faculty, which turns out to mean that when I'm in a room with mostly staff and administrators, I find myself speaking as a faculty person, and when I'm in a room with mostly faculty, I tend to find myself speaking as an administrator. That's not always fun but on the plus side, I feel like in both situations, I have an opportunity to move the conversation in productive directions. I...

Amazon’s explanation of their dealings with Hachette provide a great, highly-specific example of the connection between elasticity and total revenue. You could ask students to use the provided data to calculate what Amazon thinks is the price-elasticity of demand for e-books. In addition, this InsideHigherEd post raises some good points about substitutes and pricing strategies across books. All Things Considered aired a story this week entitled “Why are theater tickets cheaper on the West End than on Broadway?” In discussing the price difference between tickets in New York and London, the story touches on multiple economic concepts, including economies of scale, product differentiation, price discrimination, subsidies and substitutes. The next time your students ask you what they can do with an economics degree, you may want to share this article with them. It’s about how economists are increasingly being hired by tech companies to talk data and PR to customers and the media. I ...

Back in April , I mentioned that the Journal of Econ Ed  had several articles providing advice for those who submit papers to the JEE. Two other recent publications may also be useful, particularly for grad students and those at the beginning of their academic careers: In The Art and Science of Scholarly Publishing , the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , Maureen Pirog, provides some great do’s and don’ts for getting published in peer-reviewed outlets. She also summarized her main points for Inside Higher Ed . The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) has a wonderful guide for academics about how to write for non-academics, called Going Public: Writing about research in everyday language . Although the focus is on education research, Mark Dynarski and Ellen Kisker’s advice applies to anyone doing policy-relevant research. And of course, younger scholars should not miss the Primer for New Teachers of Economics i...

One common challenge for instructors new to interactive teaching is deciding exactly what to do . From one perspective, there are tons of resources available (like all those listed on my ‘Resources for Teachers’ page ), providing ideas about what to do and guidance on how to do it. But almost all of those resources are organized around pedagogy; for example, From ABBA to Zeppelin has great examples of song lyrics that can be used to teach economic concepts, Games Economists Play catalogs lots of ‘experiments’, and the Starting Point portal is organized by pedagogical tool (clickers, simulations, context-rich problems, etc.). But for folks who don’t already use these tools, how do you know which site to go to in the first place? Many economists don’t think much about pedagogy, let alone think about it first. Instead, most people start with the content they know they want to ‘cover’ and then they think about how they are going to teach it. Once you are on a site like Games Economis...

After missing the last two, I'm on my way to the Fourth Annual AEA Conference on Teaching and Research in Economic Education (CTREE) in D.C. I'll be presenting in two different sessions about flipping the classroom, both on Thursday, at 8:30am (session B6) and at 11am (session C2). There are a ton of interesting sessions - I have no idea how I'll decide which ones to go to! If any readers are attending, come find me and say hi!

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...