Today we started the June 2006 Teaching Innovations Program in Economics Workshop held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Here are some brief reflections from the sessions today:
Session 1: Introduction to the Workshop
The purpose of this workshop is to change the way you teach next semester.
Specific Objectives:
1. Present interactive teaching techniques;
2. Create an opportunity for interactive learning among the participants.
My personal goal is to learn more about how to foster student engagement in my courses.
“You’ve never learned something as well as when you have had to teach it.â€
Doing leads to a higher level of understanding than hearing about it.
Tough-love approach to teaching: high expectations promote high achievement by students. Active-learning is a more demanding teaching approach than traditional lecture.
The question to keep in your mind whenever you try a pedagogical innovation:
What are your students going to get out of this pedagogical practice?
Session 2: Team Assignment One:
Method for team building and for creating diverse teams. This looks like a useful tool for beginning a small course. Very interesting practical way for students to get to know one another: Pair off with another person in the group. Find out something you share that person. Find out something substantive about them that you didn’t know. Then you report back to the group about your partner and vice versa.
What is your favorite active learning exercise?
* Take students ¾ the way thru a concept and make them complete it. Write it up for two audiences: an economist and a non-economist.
* Do an in-class experiment; ask students to write: what did I learn from this.
* Ask students to apply a theory from the course to a situation described in a newspaper.
* To prepare for a class discussion, ask students to write a brief paper based on a reading. By class time, they have read on the discussion topic, thought about it enough to write about it, and they all have something to say.
Identify three factors that are generally common to each choice above:
• Writing
• Assessment of the exercise is essentially built into the exercise
• Student engagement – demonstrate their engagement
Present the Results (in 5 min) to the Workshop on Saturday:
1. Writing — Ask the audience to write about one useful active learning idea they learned from their group on Friday. Ask what made it useful to them (1 min).
2. Feedback/Assessment — Choose a volunteer from each group to report back to their group what they wrote about. (1 min)
3. Engagement by the Participants — Active Learning, almost by definition, involves engagement, but look at how the recipient in each group felt about getting feedback about their active learning idea. Notice where the focus of attention is here–on the students not the instructor(s)
4. Commentary — what we’ve tried to do here is not merely present our 3 common factors, but model them.
5. Commentary — By asking you to write, we modelled writing. By asking you to reflect, we modelled feedback. In monitoring your discussion, it was straightforward to assess how each group was doing. The engagement was pretty self-evident, I think.
Session 3: Classroom Experiments
This is something I’ve only dabbled in, deciding in the past that I didn’t want to spend the time to learn how to do this well. The exercises we did here motivated me to try to experiment with this (pun intended) more deeply.
Rule of Thumb: Always provide written instructions for an experiment. (E.g. the data these experiments generate will not be tested, but the underlying principles will be.)
We participated in a Multiple Round, Double-Oral Auction Market
This experiment generates multiple hypotheses:
Do markets operate at the theoretical equilibrium price?
What happens to aggregate surplus as a result of trade?
Does everyone gain?
Do this before presenting the theory of Supply and Demand: students learn better by sequencing the concrete before the abstract.
This really helps understanding of what underlies the theory. (And can demystify the theory for students who may doubt their ability to “get” economics.)
Kate switches participants’ roles (buyer vs. seller) in midstream to avoid the problem of bad draws. Also, this way they obtain understanding of both sides in the process.
Conclusions:
* This doesn’t take a great deal of time: Rounds last 3 min or less
* Multiple round games are very cool; convergence is clear.
* Does the average price move towards the theoretical equilibrium?
* Trade raises the surplus; trade has winners and losers.
Note: Trade prices are not what underlies the theoretical demand and supply curves; rather, it is the reservation prices. Trade prices are crucial, though, for testing the theory.
Mike: Avoid “Sheep dogging†– guiding the students all the way to the insight, rather than letting them discover it on their own.
Suggestions for Higher Level Critical Thinking: Don’t debrief after the experiment, but give the experimental data to the students and ask if it is consistent with the theoretical equilibrium price. As a homework assignment, ask students to identfy the winners and losers from a free trade agreement like NAFTA.
Session 4: Cooperative Learning
This is something I’m interested in and have a fair amount of experience in, but I’ve never really learned “the theoryâ€. I’m very interested in pursuing this module.
Roughly the same as collaborative learning.
Cooperative learning leads to higher order critical thinking and greater engagement by students.
Exercise: Think-Pair-Share about our definitions of cooperative learning.
Key to effective collaborative learning: The structure of the activity
Key Elements that Build Structure: PIES
1. Positive Interdependence (positive sum gain thru exchange of ideas) e.g. Surowieki’s idea that groups generate positive outcomes only when the group is diverse. Individuals have responsibility for the group’s knowledge. Single output for the great
2. Individual Accountability (the ticket to participate in class) Be prepared for the activity or there should be consequences. Avoid free riders.
3. Equal Participation (everyone has an opportunity to share)
4. Simultaneous Interaction (parallel discussions)
Exercise: Note taking pairs – Compare notes on what I just told you and consolidate them. (If you’re not sure students are getting the lecture—stop, and create note taking pairs.)
For the Meta Reflection Sessions, make the students come up with the answers, not the instructor.
“Structured Problem Solving†focuses on teaching/learning the process rather than the product.
AMENDMENT: My reflections for Day 2 of the Workshop are here.
