Which teaching approach do you want to highlight for your colleagues at the faculty right now?
My primary teaching responsibility is ECON5106/9106: “Advanced Applied Econometrics.” I taught this course last Fall, and expect to continue teaching it each Fall going forward.
Econometrics courses cover how one can learn about economic behaviors from data. This course specifically aims to equip MA and PhD students so that they can understand, critique, and implement state-of-the-art empirical microeconomics research.
Who do you collaborate with?
The key challenge for a course like this is to keep the material up-to-date, because econometric methods are rapidly developing. Much of the substance of the course comes from excellent teaching materials that have been collected by my colleague, Edwin Leuven. I augment the course in two ways. First is with somewhat “standard” resources---personal teaching materials that various well-known econometricians actively maintain and make available as a public service to the field. Second is with perspectives from active methodological debates.
This second way is difficult to do systematically, but I think it is especially valuable. Getting a glimpse into current debates is a good way to learn how to reason about good and bad econometrics, and it gives students a sense of where the research frontier lies.
In your opinion, what are the three most important factors for providing good teaching in the subject?
I think instructors generally understand the most important factors for teaching well: clarity, enthusiasm, connecting topics within a course, motivating and incentivizing students, and so on. One factor that may be underappreciated is collaboration between students. Students can learn a lot from each other, and an instructor can organize a course in such a way that encourages students to study together and ask each other questions.
If you were going to give one piece of advice to new teachers at the SV-faculty, what would it be?
As a somewhat new teacher myself, perhaps the best piece of advice that I can give is to not rock the boat too much. Instructors have often been doing things a particular way for good reason!