Pedagogy
Our course consists of three learning periods each with specialized tasks so that students are consistently applying the tools built in the classroom:
- Pre-Lecture for promoting foundation
- Lecture for targeting more complex methods
- Post-Lecture for practicing and reinforcing
As a recent Ph.D. graduate and new assistant teaching professor at the University of Notre Dame I made the decision early in my teaching career to construct a pedagogy focused on promoting active learning.
To ensure students’ absorption and mastery of the material, I transitioned from “chalk and talk” lectures to a semi-flipped, hybrid classroom which pushes first-exposure of foundational material to outside of the classroom.
Moreover, this learning pedagogy relies on a "holistic" (before, during, and after lecture) approach to understanding intermediate microeconomics. As the curriculum was developed, I recognized a gap within pedagogical instruction for intermediate and advanced economics classes.
Often, active learning strategies only target introductory and principles classes. I feel that this pedagogy can be enacted simply and modularly to achieve the desired level of active learning, so that instructors needn’t completely redesign their course curriculum.
What I found out during this transition is that a lot of the strategies developed for the introductory classes works well at the intermediate levels too.