Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

Well, I managed to go the entire five weeks of the Blendkit course (and then some) without actually blogging about it (or about anything else for that matter). For awhile I was mired in mid-semester grading (I thought I was being so smart the way I spread out exams and papers but instead, as soon as I finished one stack, there was another one coming in), and then, well, life happened. I'll try to catch up with the blended stuff eventually... One of the things that has been distracting me is putting together my 'teaching portfolio'. My chair would like to nominate me for a teaching award, which is very cool, but I need to put together a teaching portfolio that he can submit with his nomination. Although I have a statement about my teaching that I wrote for my tenure and promotion reviews, this portfolio needs to be much more extensive. Specifically, the guidelines for the award say it should include "such items as: recommendation letter(s), summaries of student evalu...

Life has gotten the better of me the last few weeks but I hope to have some new posts up soon. In the meantime, this popped up in my Facebook feed and I just had to share: And remember, no matter how you feel about the election results, the one thing we can all be happy about is that the campaign  is over!

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...

One of my service assignments this year is marketing the scholarships that my department offers. In particular, we have one scholarship that is potentially quite large (could more than cover tuition and fees) that the original donor wanted us to use specifically to attract good students into the major. But for the last few years, we have had hardly any applicants, and almost none from incoming freshmen. So my department agreed to devote some funds to have someone work on outreach to high schools. I volunteered, since it seemed like a good complement to my other interests and would give me an opportunity to connect with some high school economics teachers. Over the summer, I put together some materials about the scholarship and about economics in general, and started emailing people. So far, I've lined up a few visits to econ classes and also some AVID classes (for those who aren't familiar with it, AVID stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination and is a college readi...

... you are at Sea World and when you see all the strollers 'parked' outside Shamu Stadium, your first thought is, "This would make a great example of product differentiation!" Tutor2U has some more pictures that could be used to show economic concepts, with this description of a cool assignment for your students: My first assignment for my AS Economics group this week is to get their smartphones or tablets out and in pairs find some time to explore our locality to shoot examples of economics around them. They then select six of their favourite images and turn them into a Prezi or a PowerPoint and explain to the group why their images raise interesting economics questions.

[See previous posts for TBL basics , readiness assessments , team applications , peer evaluations/team grades , and student responses ] For those who have been following along with this series, I hope it's clear by now that TBL is pretty dramatically different from traditional chalk-and-talk. After teaching this way, it's actually really hard for me to stand up and 'lecture' in any class for more than about ten minutes. For those who are curious to find out more, the absolute best place to start is the Team-Based Learning website . The book by Michaelson, et al, is also a good starting place. To wrap up, I thought I'd address some of the questions that I think folks might have if you're considering adopting TBL... How do you get student buy-in? As I mentioned in my last post , I think it's crucial for students to understand why we are using TBL. One thing I do on the first day is ask the two questions in this article in The National Teaching and Lea...

Classes start tomorrow and I'm feeling oddly anxious. For some reason, I seem to be having a particularly hard time getting mentally into 'school mode' - I've been saying for the last week that it just doesn't feel like it's time to start classes yet. I think my problem is that we are starting a full week before Labor Day; the last few years, I think we started on Wednesday or Thursday so I had to be on campus for advising and such for a few days at the beginning of the week before starting classes and could get mentally prepared. Although I was on campus a few days last week, it just doesn't feel the same... I'm always a little bit nervous for my first classes of the semester, though the nerves generally go away as soon as I start talking. I remember feeling like I was almost going to throw up before walking into the 500-seater the first time. It helps when I already know students in the class; last spring, about two-thirds of my writing class were s...