I was invited recently to give a workshop on this topic. I’ll be honest, workshops like these fill me with foreboding and horror. They conjure up images of musty meeting rooms in sleepy departments. Participants unlucky enough to have to attend sessions such as these look forward to being able to catch a quick nap in the post lunch session – that is the best one can hope for!
But I paint with too broad a brush, of course. Not all sessions are all bad, and when done well, there is a non-zero chance that learning outcomes for students will improve down the road. And isn’t that the whole point?
But there are three things that such a workshop ought to focus upon, in my opinion, and I wanted to run these three things past you in today’s blogpost. Two reasons for doing so – do you agree with each of these three? Any points that are more important, in your opinion, than these three? Please do let me know.
- Learning should be more participatory: learning economics shouldn’t be about passive listening. It should be about learning by doing. Not always, and not in every single class. But participating in a oral double auction is one thing, and taking notes about it is entirely another. Playing the prisoner’s dilemma will help it stick much better in your head than will drawing a 2×2 matrix. Students are much more likely to remember experiences than they are a lecture, and we don’t provide enough of memorable experiences. An economist would be hard pressed to find a reason to swing a wrecking ball in front of their own face, but we could always run a Vickrey auction in class.
- Use technology: don’t teach students the Monty Hall problem, ask them to build it. Don’t teach students what the central limit theorem is, show it to them. Don’t write down the equation for the Cobb-Douglas function on the board, build a working model in Microsoft Excel. We live in the age of AI, and “but I don’t know how to code” doesn’t cut it anymore. It has been years since I did any serious coding, but I can get by just fine – and so can you.
- Economics is only part of the answer: will imposing fines for littering lead to cleaner streets? Will the answer change depending upon who imposes the fine, on whom, and in which country? An economist will say “yes” in response to the first question and will reluctantly say “yes” in response to the second. Sociology, anthropology, politics, religious beliefs and many other factors are also at play in the real world, and the ivory tower model doesn’t play well in reality. Understanding that this is a feature, and not a bug – that economic models need to be placed in the context of lived realities in different parts of the world – is something that every student of economics needs to go through.
Get students to do economics, not just learn it | Use more technology | Learn to be multi-disciplinary
That’s what I would want to focus on in a workshop where I teach folks how to get better at teaching economics. I hope you disagree, and I hope you tell me why you disagree.
Bring it on, please – and thank you in advance.
EconForEverybody 