This fall was my first time teaching – one class, undergrad intermediate macro, with 60 students.
(While I did many stints as a teaching assistant during grad school, being the professor I think is a bit of a different beast. You’re ultimately responsible!, and you have to hold a lot more in your head at once. There’s a lot more that could be said – and that I hope to say in the future – on the experience of teaching, and also on how I taught intermediate macro in particular. But that’s not today’s post.)
Before the start of the semester, I decided to put together a list of “principles of teaching” to try to guide my teaching efforts. Because teaching is such a high-dimensional design space – when you start teaching, you are really given an extreme, an extraordinary level of freedom to do whatever you want – I wanted some points to anchor to.
- Of course, the principles below are totally aspirational. I was far from perfect in implementing these principles; I do not at all pretend to be perfect as a teacher. (But overall I was happy with how things went!)
- And teaching is very much a learning-by-doing activity (just like research!), so the whole exercise might seem a bit goofy. But I still thought that sitting down and thinking for a bit about teaching principles, even sort of a priori, was useful. (And now going forward, I can iterate on the principles.)
Below, I start with some brief thoughts on the goals of teaching. Then, I list the principles for achieving those goals, plus some references/selected quotes that inspired each (the principles mostly drew on the experience of others). I‘ll hide all but the very best quotes below the clickable arrows – but I do recommend opening and reading the quotes.
I. On teaching goals
I think of four goals of teaching:
- Facts: GDP per capita growth has averaged 2% for 150 years; the Fed targets a 2% inflation rate; ...
- Ideas (“models”): the nonrivalry of ideas; the Malthusian trap; ...
- Methods: wariness of composition bias; wariness of selection bias; ...
- Inspiration.
An alternative framing is that there are two populations when teaching, and I’m aiming for different treatment effects on each:
- The tail: those for whom this material will be core to their future. Maybe they will go to grad school for economics, or more likely and more prosaically they will work in a field where economics is something they are actively thinking about every day (e.g. policy, parts of finance).
- The mass: those for whom it’s just another class. For this population, training intuition is the goal. Most students will not remember the difference between income and substitution effects in a decade. But if they can be taught, for example, to feel in their bones that essentially all of humanity used to be desperately poor, that is a major win in my book.
The extent to which students find themselves in the tail versus in the mass is of course endogenous – aiming to inspire is important for affecting this!
II. Some teaching principles
0. Have extreme empathy. Honestly, I think quite literally everything is downstream from this.
Suggested references: Ender’s Game; Ender’s Shadow.
1. Grading should be predictable. This is a boring one to start – it’s not about actual learning – but of course, from the perspective of the student this is pretty central.
- I want there to be a nearly deterministic mapping from “student effort” to “final grade”. Then, it is up to the student to make their own choice about how much effort to invest and learn.
- They can decide based on their own preferences how much they value learning and/or getting the A, versus how much they want to go to that party.
- Arbitrariness and unpredictability is (i) unfair and (ii) reduces student effort by being demotivating.
“David Perell (1:00:03): How have you practiced getting better at teaching? Tyler Cowen (1:00:08): Just by teaching a lot. I don’t find student evaluations that helpful. Mine have typically been very, very good, which I don’t equate with doing a good job. But look, it beats them being very bad, right? I think to some extent you get good evaluations just by being a predictable grader. And I think I’m a predictable grader. But I don’t confuse that with being a good teacher. I think I’m an entertaining lecturer, which is important and inspires people. But again, it’s not exactly the same as being a very good teacher.”
2. Enthusiasm matters! Show that you care – channel your enjoyment! This reflects both that teaching is an entertainment service; and it reflects the goal of inspiration. Tyler Cowen puts this fantastically well:
- “COWEN: I think just learning to channel your own enjoyment and be willing to let it show. I’ve been a teacher, professor most of my life. The way you teach people well – of course, you have to explain it properly – but it’s for them see that you care. Even bad students are such a wonderful audience for understanding if you don’t care. They sniff it out so quickly and so smartly that you are sunk right away.”
John Baez: “You’re standing up there on stage making us watch you: you’d better be worth it. The closest professions to teaching are stage acting and stand-up comedy. Learn how they do it.”
3. Actively solicit feedback. This is one of those things that is obvious but maybe not obvious if you’re not intentional about it.
(i) David Cutler: “Whenever students talk to me outside of class, I always ask them how the course is going.”
- I would not have naturally thought to ask this every time a new student showed up at office hours. The feedback I got was quite useful for calibrating how things were going.
(ii) Besides the benefits for teaching itself, students themselves directly value the opportunity to have voice.
- Perhaps I’m projecting 🫣, but it probably feels good to just get things off your chest.
(iii) Obviously, receiving feedback may be painful; and feedback may be actively wrong/unhelpful (or even worse!). But perseverance here seems important.
4. Teaching is hard because of the curse of knowledge. After spending 10,000 hours thinking about a topic, it requires intentional, costly effort to put yourself back in the shoes of someone seeing something for the first time.
Mankiw (2019): “There is no simple remedy for the curse of knowledge, but let me offer a suggestion. Keep a particular person in mind as you teach. That person should be someone you know well – a parent, a spouse, or a best friend (as long as that person is not an economist). Pretend you are explaining the material to them. Are they getting it, or are they lost? If you know this person well, you may be able to more easily empathize with their learning challenges. You might prevent yourself from going overboard.”
Bryan Caplan: “1. Take the difficulty level you naturally want to use. Now divide it by 10. Remember: The material is only obvious to you because you are the teacher. It is non-obvious to your students because they are the students. 2. If you’re teaching at MIT or Caltech, you are now at the right difficulty level. If you’re anywhere else, divide by 10 again. Remember: Even smart people are, at first, terrible at almost everything.”
5. Teach in multiple ways: target different parts of the distribution of students + recognize that the distribution is multidimensional.
David Cutler: “I may be generalizing, but I think everyone learns by seeing things multiple ways. That is to say, different people will learn predominantly from one way versus another way. A lot of people, particularly in healthcare, also learn by example. [...] Other people learn by talking about incentives. [...] Others learn things graphically. [...] So, different students will learn about it in different ways. [...] So what I do when I teach is I try and do all of those. I'll give the example, I'll give the analytics, I'll give the graph, I'll give everything and, if the point's really important, I'll linger around it for a while, just letting the students absorb it.”
Steve Medema: “One of the things that I've learned through my own children, which I probably didn't appreciate enough as a younger professor, was the variety of ways in which students learn. For me, it's been very important, particularly over the last five to eight years, to rework my courses in a way that tries to hit not the median learner but rather tries to hit different students in different ways that reflect their ways of learning. I’m a lecturer. I stand up in front of the class. I talk. I don’t use PowerPoint. I generally don’t use overheads. I use colored chalk. So, there is plenty of visual – less so in the history of thought class than, say, in my price theory courses —to go with the verbal intuition. I try to choose the types of readings for the different classes in ways that will resonate with different types of students. Where it really comes through is in the assessment mechanisms because my view of the assessment process is that, yes, it’s about me figuring out what students know so I can give them an appropriate grade, but I also like the assessment process to be a learning mechanism for the students. And so, I try to offer them a variety of things, from regular tests to short papers to daily written exercises.”
John List: “My typical approach is to teach to about the 90th percentile, and then try to bring the bottom along by showing them how easy and simple basic economic intuition is. My strong belief is that economics is just common sense. So to show them how to think about economics in a very straightforward way, and be able to use common sense to approach the various questions that we're facing in environmental economics, I've found that it's easy to get that left tail up. [...] But you can't teach to the 10th percentile, because then you lose the top.”
Anthony Lee Zhang: follow a barbell strategy.
6. Keep it simple – but that doesn’t mean easy: teach fewer things but teach them more deeply. (This principle is not universal to all courses.)
Josh Hendrickson: “Introductory courses try to introduce far too much information and far too many ideas into a single semester. On some level, one might argue that this does make things simple since the student doesn’t really have to learn much about any particular topic. Although it is true that the student might find such a class to be easy and thus conclude that economics is simple, there is a difference between easy and simple. I do not want the class to be easy. I want it to be challenging. However, I do want the class to be simple.”
7. Each and every theory must be presented back by empirical evidence, not passed down as wisdom of the ancients.
John List’s intro micro textbook, with Acemoglu and Laibson, drilled this into me.
Noah Smith, complaining about how macro is taught: “That was the second problem I had with the course: it didn't discuss how we knew if these theories were right or wrong.”
8. Inoculation is an important part of the job: against appealing-but-wrong ways of thinking; and against popular-but-wrong “facts”/memes.
9. It’s okay or may even be good if learning feels painful.
- E.g. people think they learn less with active learning, because it’s harder.
III. Some tactical teaching principles
10. Repetition is important (especially for undergrads). Backtracking at the start of class is a good way to achieve this.
11. Consistency is important, e.g. in notation and terminology.
- Two exceptions, noting that the intentionality here is important:
- (i) Mixing things up to intentionally force students to adapt, which is useful for preventing ‘fragility’ in learning and promoting deeper understanding.
- (ii) Using different terms that have the exact same meaning intentionally for the reason that in the real world people do jump between those different terms, even though they have the same meaning. Useful for obvious reasons.
12. Teaching facts and encouraging memorization of facts is underrated.
Michael Nielsen: “Over the years, I've often helped people learn technical subjects such as quantum mechanics. Over time you come to see patterns in how people get stuck. One common pattern is that people think they're getting stuck on esoteric, complex issues. But when you dig down it turns out they're having a hard time with basic notation and terminology. It's difficult to understand quantum mechanics when you're unclear about every third word or piece of notation! Every sentence is a struggle. It's like they're trying to compose a beautiful sonnet in French, but only know 200 words of French. They're frustrated, and think the trouble is the difficulty of finding a good theme, striking sentiments and images, and so on. But really the issue is that they have only 200 words with which to compose.”
Nina Panickssery: “People talk about meditation/mindfulness practices making them more aware of physical sensations. In general, having "heightened awareness" is often associated with processing more raw sense data but in a simple way. I'd like to propose an alternative version of "heightened awareness" that results from consciously knowing more information. The idea is that the more you know, the more you notice. You spot more patterns, make more connections, see more detail and structure in the world..”
13. Simple, decisive empirical moments are both more memorable and plausibly more important evidence than fancy complicated evidence.
Joe Stiglitz via Matt Rognlie: “Economists spend enormous energy providing refined testing to their models. Economists often seem to forget that some of the most important theories in physics are either verified or refuted by a single observation, or a limited number of observations (e.g. Einstein’s theory of relativity, or the theory of black holes).”
14. “See the other side”: help students understand the perspective of other students.
Emily Oster: “One of my tricks in teaching is the midterm evaluation. In every class I give the students the chance to weigh in halfway through, with any advice for what they would change. One reason to do this is to find out if there are (fixable) things I’m doing wrong (yes, always). But the second is to surface the student comments to each other. After the evaluations, I do a little post-mortem to show the students what they said. Doing this surface the diversity of experiences. I tend to teach fairly math-heavy classes, but I try to teach them accessibly. Invariably, I will get at least one comment that says “There is too much math” and at least one that says “I wish there was more math.” By putting those comments in front of the students (anonymously) they get a sense of what others are thinking, a better appreciation for the needs of their fellow students.”
15. Considering extreme cases is usefully clarifying.
See e.g. Bryan Caplan on teaching income versus substitution effects.
16. Rapid feedback is important.
17. Ensuring students get reps in is important.
- No one learns to ride a bike from successfully doing it once.
18. Cold calling is useful. Three reasons: (1) it incentivizes active learning; (2) it keeps energy high; (3) it allows me to check understanding.
19. Connecting to current events is useful.
20. Teaching centered on questions may be useful.
Andy Matuschak: “When teaching, it feels natural to center on powerful ideas or techniques. But it’s usually better to center on *questions*—ideas and techniques can follow. Ideally, they’re deep, meaningful questions with no “right” answer, an active object for experts in the discipline.”
21. Sitting in on colleagues’ lectures for the same course is useful (h/t Luke Stein).
(I was not fantastic about principles 16-21 this semester.)
22. Teaching dialectically and showing the history of thought is useful.
23. Get student buy-in on the electronics policy: I like Justin Wolfer’s approach.
24. Send encouraging emails at the end of the semester to relevant students (h/t a deleted tweet from Kathryn Paige Harden).
25. Smile (see principle #2).
Shoutout to NS during my undergrad.
IV. Bonus: thoughts on math
Brief thoughts, very relevant for teaching economics, especially to undergrads of heterogeneous ability:
(1). The use of math and formal models is an act of intellectual humility.
Ryan Decker: “A lot of people seem to be deluding themselves into thinking that narrative/heuristic economics can be done without a lot of assumptions. You're lying to yourself if you think that. Macroeconomics is really, really difficult. You can’t do it without simplifying assumptions. If you think you can, you're either arrogant or naive. Show me a narrative essay that accounts for all the heterogeneity and cognitive biases and informational issues and idiosyncratic market structures and time variation and legal framework that exists in the real world.
Using math is an act of intellectual humility: I admit that I cannot keep track of a lot of moving parts in my head, and I'm willing to subject my reasoning to the scorn of others, in a decent-sized package, so that my model can be easily criticized. That doesn't mean that discarding math is arrogant in and of itself, but it does mean that discarding math may force others to wade through a big narrative to isolate your assumptions and shortcuts. And that can be very costly.”
Paul Krugman: “Most of the topics on which economists hold views that are both different from ‘common sense’ and unambiguously closer to the truth than popular beliefs involve some form of adding-up constraint, indirect chain of causation, feedback effect, etc.. Why can economists keep such things straight when even highly intelligent non-economists cannot? Because they have used mathematical models to help focus and form their intuition.”
(2). Models are intuition pumps: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”.
Paul Krugman: “Economists use mathematics not merely as a way to check the internal consistency of their ideas, but as an ‘intuition pump’; they start with a vaguely formulated idea, try to build a model that conveys that idea, and allow the developing model in turn to alter their intuitions.”
(3). “Burn the mathematics” [Marshall]: math forces you to be precise and internally consistent – but it’s important to always translate back and be in dialogue with economic intuition.
Alfred Marshall: “(1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can't succeed in 4, burn 3.”
Paul Krugman: “The biggest thrill in theory is the moment when your model tells you something that should have been obvious all along, something that you can immediately relate to what you know about the world, and yet which you didn't really appreciate.”
(4). Be cautious about the mapping between math and reality.
Dietz Vollrath channeling Paul Romer: “Mathiness [...] comes from the disconnect of the language from the math. The math does not serve to sharply illuminate a piece of intuition, it sows confusion.”
Cameron Harwick: “But it’s unclear that the interpretive fuzziness of a mathematical model – when you try to map model concepts to real world objects – affords fewer degrees of freedom than the ‘internal’ fuzziness of a verbal model. You haven’t eliminated your degrees of freedom; you’ve just moved them from the model stage to the mapping stage.”
(5). Formal proof is the last step of mathematical understanding.
Other resources
As a grad student, when TAing for the first time, I liked reading The Heart of Teaching Economics. Simon Bowmaker interviews a set of well-known economists and asks them about how they teach. Bowmaker has also posted many of these interviews for free on his Twitter – a handful are linked with the quotes above.
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Email: basilh@virginia.edu
Twitter: @basilhalperin