These are some of the anonymous teaching evaluations I received after presenting a guest lecture for a graduate level class at Georgia State University. I gave a lecture for “Synthetic Control Methods (SCM)” at Causal Inference and Evidence Based Policy Class, a Ph.D. level course. In this class, most students have done their due diligence of reading the materials before class. After reviewing the basics, I dedicated most of my lecture time to the applications of the design. I applied the design with the related readings and with my own research. This method had proven to encourage students to be more engaged in a class discussion. The outcome of this method is also apparent to me as some students consulted to me further to use the design for their own research. As the above testimonials show, most students are able to understand the concept well and implement the method to his/her own paper.
My experience in teaching began when I was in the fourth year of my undergraduate study at the Faculty of Economics, University of Indonesia. I applied to be a teaching assistant in my program. I taught introductory and advanced levels of microeconomics and macroeconomics for the economics undergraduate program. One of the lessons I learnt as a teaching assistant is the importance of early detection of students’ comprehension. The earlier I understand students’ difficulties, the easier for me to help them. As materials built upon the earlier concepts, most students who did not understand the materials introduced earlier in the semester, cannot cope with the materials introduced later. Even with materials that do not necessarily relate to the earlier materials, students tend to not pay attention if they did not understand the earlier concepts. I used short quizzes to test their comprehension level. Then, I reviewed the materials that most students found difficult to understand. I found that quizzes were not only important to me to detect their difficulties with the materials but also important to the students. In my experience, most students did not know that they had problems understanding the materials until they took the test.
Teaching gave me the opportunity to review and update methods and materials. I view teaching and research as complementary factors to support my career as an academia and researcher. Although not limited to these following courses, I would be interested in teaching Microeconomics, Environmental Economics, Economics of Development and Causal Inference courses.