My philosophy of teaching.

I like to think of learning as a journey upon which I serve both as guide and passenger.  I know the beginning point and the destination, but the specific route is up to the student.  This is not to say, that my role is passive—indeed it requires care and attention, but rather my role is to de-center myself, and to center the student as the engine of the learning process.  The particular challenge of the teacher-scholar is to guide and support while respecting the agency of the student to choose their preferred route and the stops they make along the way.

            My concept of teaching begins with this idea: that the act of learning varies wildly from student to student—that is, the routes from ignorance to expertise that they choose are as unique as the students themselves.  This broad distribution of preferences over learning styles introduces a practical complication to the act of teaching: it is virtually impossible to individually direct students along their own optimal route.  Fortunately, as economists, we know that, given the appropriate tools and the right information, individuals can be quite good at optimizing their own routes.

            It seems to me that the solution to the challenge of student uniqueness is to facilitate agency, a key feature of the paradigm of Student-Centered Learning.  This is appealing for several reasons: first, it’s logistically easier than creating individual lesson plans for each student; secondly, it’s more equitable in that it allows for spending extra time with students who need it most, while ensuring that students who don’t need extra time are neither ignored nor smothered; and thirdly, it ensures learning is more salient to the students as it happens under their own power.  This kind of teaching is achieved through three broad strategies—the Three Es: encouraging, equipping, and empowering.  Students achieve mastery of material when they’re both emotionally and mentally engaged with it.  They also achieve mastery of material when they have the right tools for the job.  They achieve mastery still when they’re given opportunities to connect concepts in creative ways.

Encouraging students might seem like a vague concept at first, but one of the absolutely fundamental structures of learning is positive reinforcement.  Since the early work of behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, (1953) to the work of positive psychologists Maslow, (1943) and Rogers (1961), we know that integration of new information and behaviors is often best facilitated by connecting those materials to the elicitation of positive affect.  There are many ways to encourage students: I encourage their boldness when they step out into unfamiliar territory, I encourage their diligent fruitful efforts, their curiosity, and I encourage their self-correcting behavior.  Connecting positive emotions to the learning process ensures motivation that persists even when the material to be learned is dense and dry.  During my time teaching at Georgia State, I found this practice particularly useful in attending to the needs of my Principles of Economics students, many of whom were racial or ethnic minorities and first-generation students.  I found these students to be particularly fertile ground for encouragement.  For example, I remember emailing one student (who had performed quite poorly on the first midterm) how very proud I was that they had doubled their score on the second midterm, and that I wanted them to try very hard to earn an at least an A- on the final exam so that they would earn a B+ in the class.  They earned an A+ on the final and very nearly earned an A- in the course, and wrote a heartwarming personal note of thanks that I still keep and treasure to this day.

Equipping students is not always as straightforward as encouraging.  To be sure it involves providing the standard fare: study guides, handouts, and object lessons, but the why is as important as the how.  To this end, I provide my students (especially introductory level) with thoughtfully curated media: TikTok and YouTube videos, podcasts, as well as news articles and Twitter or Reddit threads.  These help students connect what they learn in class to real-world events.  For upper-level students, I engage them directly in current scholarship.  One tool I use to do this is the jigsaw literature review (Aronson, 1978), which I introduce with my coauthors in our forthcoming article in the Journal of Economic Education. The jigsaw literature review puts research with opposing viewpoints (particularly on contemporary and controversial topics) directly into the hands of students, and then has them teach each other the content of these papers, and then synthesize their own conclusions from these readings.  This tool is useful in accomplishing the goal of exposing students to policy-relevant readings about topics such as race, inequality, sexuality, and discrimination as recommended by The Committee for the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (CSMGEP, 2020).  My teaching evaluations reflect that my students appreciate these tools and find them useful in integrating what they learn in the classroom.

Finally, empowering students is the delicate art of setting them up to succeed.  I believe that by curating moments and tasks in which students are able to prove their mastery to themselves in addition to me, their instructor, fosters a virtuous, iterative cycle of learning.  Empowerment is all about making the student into the teacher—it is the final step in the journey from ignorance to expertise.  This can be achieved in several ways: the completion of a supervised research project is most frequently used for upper-level students, while structured writing assignments might be more appropriate for introductory-level students.  Another practice I have found useful in empowering students is in classroom discussion.  In-class discussion powered with carefully curated questions and multiple correct answers can set students up to succeed, and online discussion boards via LMS engagement can provide similar outlets for students uncomfortable with in-classroom discussion.  Finally, empowering students happens through mentorship.  I have had the great privilege to mentor 4 of my students in furthering their education in graduate school, 3 of whom were women, all of whom were racial or ethnic minorities.  One of these students was accepted at the prestigious American Economic Association Summer Pre-Doctoral program and has since been accepted at a top 40 economics PhD program.

            Teaching is nothing without student engagement.  Without student engagement, we all might as well be talking to a wall.  By carefully deploying the three E’s, I accomplish two tasks: I hold myself accountable to my own concept of teaching while also ensuring that I proceed in a systematic and measurable way.  This makes teaching and learning a truly two-sided process where each student’s success is a function of both their effort and mine.  In this way, I preserve student agency while maintaining high pedagogical standards.  Consequently, my students frequently outperformed their peers on the Test of Understanding in College Economics (TUCE) and my teaching evaluations, while not the ideal measure of effectiveness, outperform those of my colleagues.  While I love teaching, I don’t believe this is a reflection of how good I am at it, but rather that the philosophy I’ve described above simply works.  Engaged students are successful students, and successful students are the fruit of a successful philosophy of teaching.