The course syllabus attached in this section serves as a contract between my students and me. In it, I explicitly convey my expectations for them throughout the course - inside and outside the classroom. I outline the blueprint of the course (where we are going) and highlight important dates (exams, project deadlines) to allow the students to be as forward looking as posiible. On my end, I am as transparent as possible in regards to assessment criteria. It is important for students to know how they will be "graded". This provides a platform for time and effort allocation throughout the course.

Course Description

The goal of this course is to provide students with an introductory understanding of issues related to the macro (aggregate) economy. By the end of the course, students should have a conceptual and analytical framework in place to discuss and investigate the behavior and determinants of overall economic activity and the business cycle, employment, inflation, interest rates and financial markets.

In addition, I challenge students to dig deeper in these objectives in two ways. First, I ask students to collect data on the above variables and apply a descriptive analysis of what they find. Second, I require students to keep a documented portfolio of curent events and news articles that relate to the present topics covered in the course. A analytical treatment of the topic in conjunction with prediction and/or policy prescription should be included. These two branches of the course urge students to "think like an economist" and apply the tools of the course to real-life markets and economic situations.

This is a course on Macroeconomics. Some of the course goals are for students to gain a deeper understanding of the aggregate economy, its relationship with financial markets and the impacts of monetary and fiscal policy on its outcomes. Steps towards this are taken through classroom lectures, group-based exercises, classroom discussion, newspaper articles, online media and learning supplements and an out-of-class interactive learning platform.

I assess students’ learning through pre-class quizzes, mid-term and final exams, post-class quizzes and their macro journal; each serving a specific purpose for active learning and overall evaluation (see Statement of Teaching Competence). As outlined in my philosophy of teaching statement, the ‘testing effect” is incorporated into the course via MyEconLab. This active learning outside of the classroom translates into a substantially more dynamic classroom the following week.

The macro-journal encourages active-learning amongst the students as opposed to the traditional teacher-to-student approach. As discussed in the Statement of Teaching Competence, asking students to embark on the learning process through writing exercises provides a setting to formalize concepts and analysis in a clear and concise manner.

The attached sample exam from the course highlights some channels that I asses student’s learning progress. Several questions require clear, concise and coherent written responses. These questions are meant to elicit a higher order of thinking regarding the conceptual and analytical frameworks developed during the course.

Growth as a college educator is an on-going and ever-changing process. Looking back on this course, I can highlight techniques and methodologies that were both beneficial and costly to this process. For instance, the dialogue that I maintained with students throughout the semester inside the classroom, in office hours, through emails and MyEconLab created a “shared” learning experience for my students and myself. My pre-class quizzes provided a level of transparency and forward-looking habits for the students and the course as a whole. Alternatively, although I used them infrequently, the incorporation of power point slides for classroom instruction sometimes resulted in students “checking out”. By observing attention rates decline, I have thought about using such a learning vehicle more as a supplement to classroom discussion perhaps in a situation where visual aids may enhance teaching effectiveness.