Teach Better

In the statistical methods courses I teach in the medical school, my students are almost all MD’s that juggle clinical service, classwork, and conferences. Because they miss occasional classes and I wanted to give them a way to catch up, we’ve been recording every lecture for the past year with Echo 360. Within 30 minutes of the end of class, the video of both me and whatever I project on the screen is automatically available. It’s worked well enough that I decided to do the same thing in my undergraduate econometrics class this fall. I thought it would be useful, but I didn’t know for sure since it had never been done for a big (150+ student) undergraduate lecture at Yale before. I was also a little worried that none of my students would show up for my lectures if they had the option of watching from their rooms, but this didn’t happen. It turns out the students absolutely loved the video lectures even when they came to class.

Read on →

At the beginning of the semester I was extremely excited about replacing my traditional sections with data analysis labs. It was a lot of work writing the 11 labs (and solutions), and they certainly got off to a rocky start, but they got better as the semester progressed and I’m very optimistic about doing them again next year with a few tweaks.

Read on →

According to the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States has 3.7 million K-12 teachers and 1.3 million teachers in higher education. That’s 2% of the US adult population, and I think it’s a vast underestimate of the number of people that teach as a regular part of their job.

Read on →

I tried a lot of new things in my class this semester, and now that it’s over, it’s time to take stock of what worked and what didn’t. This fall my students posted 492 questions to our Piazza online discussion board. I answered 385 of them and contributed another 173 follow-up responses. It was a fair amount of work, but it meant everyone could read my answers and almost no one felt the need to come to my office hours. I missed the personal connections you make during office hours, but this system was a far more efficient use of everyone’s time.

Read on →

One of the most successful parts of my class this fall (Econometrics with about 150 students) was the Piazza online discussion board. I’ll be writing more about Piazza soon as I systematically document the huge amount I’ve learned teaching during the semester, but today I want to focus on one aspect of Piazza. By default, Piazza allows students to post questions anonymously. Their fellow students don’t know who they are and neither do I. This sometimes led to mildly annoying posts like these:

Read on →

The other day a friend told me that male students outnumber female students two to one in Harvard economics classes, but that the women don’t realize it because the students who show up for lecture are about evenly split. I asked one of my students what she thought was going on. She looked at me funny and said “Girls are Try Hards—Of course they go to lecture more than boys. They spend more time on problem sets and papers and studying for exams too.” Then it occurred to me that I’ve got data—I could see if this really true, at least in my class. What I found was surprising.

Read on →

For more than a year now, all the lectures I give down in the med school have been automatically recorded and are available to my students within about 30 minutes of the end of class. They are not perfectly polished productions, but they are a great way for students to catch up when they can’t make it to class or when they want to review a particular topic.

Read on →

Students at Yale feel no obligation to attend lecture. They often tell me that if they aren’t getting anything out of lecture, they’ll just stop going. As an economist, the idea that students are simply making a rational choice appeals to me. As a professor who currently sees about half his students coming to lecture, I find it somewhat distressing.

Read on →

A few weeks ago a reporter for the Yale Herald (“Yale’s most daring publication since 1986”) interviewed me about teaching at Yale. We had a long pleasant talk, and the resulting article was just published. Many faculty are quoted, but it seems I was willing to say the most extreme things and thus got fairly high billing. I don’t (yet) regret anything I said, but I do want to flesh out a few points.

Read on →