Introductions

I teach at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, NC, the largest historically black college and university (HBCU) in the U.S. and the home of the Greensboro Four, four NC A&T freshman who started the sit-in movement across the South by asking to be served at the whites-only lunch counter (and refusing to leave) at the Woolworth department store in downtown Greensboro. I currently serve as interim economics department chair and have been back in the department for 2.5 years after leading the university's teaching and learning center for 12 years. Before that I was a tenured faculty member in the economics department at A&T. I've been at A&T for 23 years and at UNC-Greensboro for 8 years prior to that.

I'm excited to be working with Phil, Mark, and all of you on this TBL project! For Mark Maier and me, this project is the fifth NSF-funded economic education pedagogy-related project that we've collaborated on as PIs since 2000 - and Mark has done still others related to teaching economics in community colleges! So, we are committed to promoting disciplinary change in teaching and learning through evidence-based teaching practices.

Mark and I have led similar workshops at SERC previously, when we were developing the Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics web portal. We’ve found the Carleton campus to be a relaxing place to focus our minds and the SERC staff has always been wonderful. We look forward to another great workshop there. Thanks for being with us! We look forward to working with you!

My wife and I are both from New Ulm, MN, just 90 minutes or so away from Carleton College, and I graduated from St. John’s University in MN as an undergrad, a college not unlike Carleton or St. Olaf College, also in Northfield. My wife and I share a very German heritage, as the name of our hometown suggests. Last summer we took a two-week Rick Steves trip to Germany and hope to travel abroad regularly going forward. We've been to Australia before, and I've been to the UK a number of times, and also to Kerala, India. In addition to travel, we enjoy theater and visiting our children/spouses - now 26, 29, and 33! We're together annually as an extended family (30-40 of us) at a lake in northern MN during the week of the 4th of July - a fantastic memory-maker for us and our children! So we’ll be back again very soon!

I look forward to meeting everyone in little over a week, especially those new to the TBL team. I've worked with several of you in the past, including workshops at SERC, a host you will find most helpful and a location conducive to comfortable collaboration.

I teach at Glendale Community College in California and live in nearby Pasadena. Although my teaching load is limited primarily to principles courses, it remains a challenge to engage students diverse in their backgrounds and skills. A majority of the Glendale students are of Armenian background--Glendale is the largest Armenian community not in Armenia itself--and many of my students are recent immigrants from Iran, Russia, and Sweden, part of the Armenia diaspora.

As Scott pointed out, we have been to SERC in the past preparing Starting Point: Teaching and Learning Economics, a project collaborative in the same way we will build TBL in economics. I find it exciting to work with economists teaching at varied institutions but all wanting to move the profession toward more effective pedagogy. I am a relatively recent convert to TBL, having used structured cooperative learning in my courses for many years.

I'll be flying to Minneapolis from father's day in San Francisco where my daughter recently settled and teaches in the public schools. Following our SERC meeting, my wife and I will go to New York to visit my son, also a teacher of young children. It runs in the family: my wife teaches pre-school and is an inspiration to me about what makes for a good classroom. "Talk about it" is her mantra, and something I try to follow.

I teach at St. Olaf College, also located in Northfield, across the river from Carleton. I have used team-based learning for six and a half years. I don't use pure TBL, in the sense that not all of my classroom applications have the 4 S's. But many of them do. I am a health economist, and health care economics and behavioral economics are my favorite courses to teach. I also love teaching microeconomic theory. I'm writing a book on blockchain, behavioral economics and health care right now, and am very excited about blockchain. Let's talk sometime, if you are a fellow blockchain enthusiast.

On campus, I started running an extracirricular group called REAL (Resilience, Empathy, Assertiveness, Listening) to help with some of the campus climate and societal problems that have arisen in the past couple of years.

Outside of work, I enjoy hiking, reading, and book clubs. I'm very excited to meet everyone!

Ashley: I'd love to hear more about your blockchain work, as I suspect others would as well, perhaps over a beer with our fellow workshop participants at The Contented Cow on Monday or Tuesday evening :-)

I'm Ross Guest from Griffith University, Australia (half way up the east coast in Brisbane, an hour flight north of Sydney). I love teaching economics but don't do as much as I would like nowadays due to my admin role as Associate Dean, Learning and Teaching, in our Business School. In this role I am trying to encourage our faculty to focus on active learning strategies, of which team-based and collaborative learning is an example. So this workshop will be very worthwhile for me. (My journey in active learning started as a high school teacher of economics which I did for 10 years before becoming a university academic. Active learning is the only learning that works in high school - trust me from hard experience !)

I enjoy my role as Editor-In-Chief of the International Review of Economics Education - it allows me to see some wonderful innovative work that is being undertaken in economics teaching around the world. I've written a lot of journal articles on economics education in the past but nowadays my joy is to appreciate what others are writing.

I have also really enjoyed my textbook writing, e.g. co-authoring the Australian adaptation of Joseph Stiglitz textbook on intro economics; and a sole-authored book: 'Government in a Market Economy'.

It was an honour to be recently appointed Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Personal: I love golf but am getting progressively worse at it (a once handicap of 7 has become 15). I like to travel to visit my daughter(a math teacher in Sydney) and my 6 month old grandson. I love to read about politics and public policy.

Looking forward to meeting you all at the workshop !

I most recently taught principles of economics courses at a younger medium-sized community college about 1-2 hours east of Los Angeles named Moreno Valley College. Prior to that, I had the good fortune of starting my community college teaching under the tutelage of Mark Maier, Michelle Kim, and other supportive faculty at Glendale Community College. I also benefited from workshops that Mark and Scott organized, including at SERC. I used TBL in my Moreno Valley classes and found it both very challenging and very rewarding for both my students and myself. Luckily, I had great resources and supportive colleagues along the way. I first learned about TBL over a winter break by checking out Michaelsen, Knight, and Fink (2004) from a professional development library and attended my first TBLC conference, including the pre-conference with "TBL 101," soon after. Currently, I am a PhD student in Urban Education Policy at the University of Southern California. My research evaluates K-12 and postsecondary programs and policies.

I started taking short walks recently, which I really enjoy. I'll try to go on one if there is time at the workshop. Please join me!

Hello TBL Colleagues!
My name is Amber Casolari. I started my university economics teaching career in 1997 at the University of California and the California State Universities. I have been a full-time faculty member in the California Community College system for 18 years, the last 13 years at Riverside City College. I have been active in other NSF project with Mark and Scott and I recently published an article that discusses the benefits of an 8-week blended course model. I enjoy kickboxing, cooking, reading and traveling!

My name is Siny Joseph and I am an Associate Professor at Kansas State University's Polytechnic Campus. My teaching career is all of 8 years and counting. I adopted and adapted TBL pedagogy in my introductory Micro and Macroeconomics courses from Fall 2013. Like Ashley I do not follow pure TBL, but have preserved the essence of the pedagogy for the most part. I am an enthusiastic follower of this style of learning and have found my teaching and student's learning experience has greatly improved over the past few years. My colleagues and I developed a voluntary campus-wide hybrid faculty development program of hosting and observing classrooms for teaching excellence. This resulted in a recently published article and also was awarded a Big 12 Fellowship to learn from other Big 12 institutions which have a similar program.

I was born in Kerala, India and would love to hear Scott's experience visiting the place! Between work and attending to my twin 8 year old daughters needs, there is not much time left to pursue my passions. However, I enjoy traveling, hiking, cooking, and Zumba whenever I can! I look forward to meeting everyone at the workshop!

My name is Craig Heinicke. I teach economics at the University of Richmond in Virginia. I have taught for over 25 years at UR and before that Baldwin-Wallace University and William and Mary. I recently adopted team based learning for principles of micro and macro. It has gone quite well so far, but my efforts are very much a work in progress. I am contemplating using TBL in American economic history, one of my research areas. I continue to look for ways to get feedback and improve. When not working I enjoy family time, hiking, fishing, and listening to music people don't like.

Hi all, I'm Jennifer Imazeki (you may hear Mark and others call me Jenn - feel free to do the same, as long as you spell with two n's!). I'm the external evaluator for this project, though I'm still figuring out what that actually means. I'm at San Diego State University where I am currently serving as the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. Because of that appointment, I haven't actually been teaching much the last few years but am really hoping to get back into the classroom soon, and will certainly be using TBL when I do. I started using TBL several years ago when I took over a data analysis course that we require of all our Econ majors. The previous instructor had taught it as 'mini-econometrics' with a whole bunch of stats theory but it was *supposed* to be a much more applied, hands-on-with-data kind of course. So I ended up designing it from scratch and in the process, stumbled on TBL because it seemed the only way I was going to be able to do what I wanted to do with a class of 75 students. At the time, I didn't know anyone else (and certainly no economists) using TBL so I taught myself from Michaelson's book and the TBL website.

Aside from teaching and economics, I'm a singer, though I'm currently between groups - I sang for 12 years with a 7-person a cappella group but decided to take a break last year. I'm starting to really miss it and have begun looking for another group or choir to join. I'm looking forward to meeting / seeing everyone!

My name is Marcelo Clerici-Arias, and I teach economics at Stanford, where I also direct the honors program in economics and public policy. I’m from Argentina, but I’ve been in the United States for 25+ years, first as a graduate student, then working at Stanford since 1998. For 12 of those years I split my time between the econ department and our center for teaching and learning, where I was the associate director for the social sciences. Since 2013 I’m back full time at the econ department.

Outside economics, for 15 years I was Resident Fellow at one of the all-frosh dorms at Stanford. For 10 years or so I was very active in the youth soccer community in a variety of roles, including coach, team manager, referee, board member, and president of a local soccer club. And the World Cup starts tomorrow! Shame on you, Phil, Mark, and Scott, for scheduling the workshop during the World Cup :)

I love hiking as well as traveling. This summer my wife and I will spend a month and a half in China, and at the end of August I’ll be at a conference in Sweden, and I’ll add a few personal days to visit the area (first time in both countries). For 15 years or so I was fairly serious about photography, but in the last two years I’ve taken a couple of drawing courses and I’ve abandoned photography, at least for now.

Finally, my wife and I have two grown-up kids. The older is 23; he studied in Boston College (econ major, math minor), and stayed working in Boston. The younger is 21, and she’s graduating in three days from UC Santa Barbara (math major); she’ll be working in San Francisco starting June 25.

So yesterday (Tuesday) my Econ 1 students took their final exam, tomorrow (Thursday) I’ll enter the grades at night, and on Friday morning my wife and I will be driving to Santa Barbara, enjoying the graduation ceremonies. Then on Sunday afternoon we head back home near San Francisco, and I’ll sleep a few hours to be ready for the 6am flight to Minnesota. Yikes!

I look forward to talking with all of you, both old friends and new faces.

Hi everyone,
My name is Alan Green and I'm an associate professor of economics and department chair at Stetson University, which is a small liberal arts college in Florida. I've just finished my 9th year of teaching; the first four were in South Carolina at Lander University and the last five have been at Stetson. I love teaching and finding ways to engage students, including simulations, experiments and TBL. I first attempted TBL when I came to Stetson and failed miserably with it twice in intermediate microeconomics. Then I was assigned to discuss Mark Meier's presentation on using TBL in economics at CTREE, and I realized I had been doing it all wrong! Since then I've implemented TBL to various degrees (I'm not a purist is any sense) in my introductory course, intermediate micro, international economics and most recently intermediate macro and foundations of globalization (a team-taught economic history class).
As chair of a small department (4 full-time economics faculty) that is fully committed to excellent teaching, I am spending my teaching energy these days on both continuing to improve my own classes and working with my colleagues on improving teaching across the department. Two of them are now using TBL and I am excited to learn more at this workshop and also contribute to materials that I know my colleagues will be thrilled to have available.
Outside of work I love playing games with my kids (four of them, ages 8-17) and traveling. At the end of the month the whole family is heading to Europe for a five week trip, the bulk of which will be spent in Innsbruck, Austria where I'll teach a summer seminar on Game Theory, perhaps my favorite course!

Hi everyone, my name is Emily Marshall, and I am currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at Dickinson College, a small liberal arts school in Carlisle, PA. I have been teaching for 7 years, 3 years at Dickinson, 1 year at Bates College, and 3 years at the University of Kentucky as a graduate student. I teach all levels of macroeconomics: principles, intermediate, upper-level electives, and senior seminar. I also teach in our econometrics sequence. Currently, I am also co-directing our Quantitative Reasoning Center on campus which provides peer tutoring for courses with mathematical content.

I am a macroeconomist and most of my work focuses on the role of housing in the business cycle. However, I have recently been involved with several other projects including looking at the relationship between the shadow economy and crime and household debt dynamics following natural disasters. I also work on research related to various topics in economic education including optimal assignment frequency, gender differences in student evaluations of teaching, and using writing and reproducible data methods to teach econometrics.

Beyond economics, I enjoy spending time with my dog (Hank), watching college basketball (Go Cats!), and good food. I also enjoy hiking or anything outdoors, and I am an assistant field hockey coach at Dickinson.

Hi! My name is Tisha Emerson and I'm a professor at Baylor University where I have been for 18 years. I have taught a variety of courses including a one semester introductory survey course, both principles of micro and macro, intermediate micro theory, environmental economics, international trade, and economic development. My research has addressed topics in business ethics and environmental economics - but the vast majority has been in economic education with my primary interest being on the efficacy of active learning pedagogical techniques (classroom experiments and cooperative learning) and diversity in the economics major. In the classroom, I have used a variety of active learning strategies with my favorite being classroom experiments.

Outside of work, I spend most of my time with my family - especially my 14 year old daughter. She plays tennis, so I watch a lot of tennis ... both amateur and professional (my very favorite player is Roger Federer). I also love to travel.

My name is Kate Silz-Carson, and I am serving as a consultant on this project. I will be helping the investigators to set up the study design for the (semi-) randomized controlled trial, as well as assisting with getting the project through as many IRBs as required. Presumably, I'll also help with data analysis at some point as well. I have used TBL in intermediate microeconomics, with what I would characterize as mixed results. I think that part of my role on this project is to serve as a devil's advocate. When I implemented TBL, like Jennifer, I followed the guidance from Michaelson, Knight, and Fink (2004) and the web site. During the course of the year I used it, I started to wonder what the marginal benefit of each element of the pedagogy is (I am an economist, after all). Are all elements really required? Do diminishing returns set in at some point? If so, where? These are the questions that interest me the most, and are ones that require answers if we are going to convince our broader audience of economists that TBL is a pedagogical technique worth considering. The study design for this project will examine one aspect of this question, which is why I am excited to be involved.

My name is Kate Silz-Carson, and I am serving as a consultant on this project. I will be helping the investigators to set up the study design for the (semi-) randomized controlled trial, as well as assisting with getting the project through as many IRBs as required. Presumably, I'll also help with data analysis at some point as well. I have used TBL in intermediate microeconomics, with what I would characterize as mixed results. I think that part of my role on this project is to serve as a devil's advocate. When I implemented TBL, like Jennifer, I followed the guidance from Michaelson, Knight, and Fink (2004) and the web site. During the course of the year I used it, I started to wonder what the marginal benefit of each element of the pedagogy is (I am an economist, after all). Are all elements really required? Do diminishing returns set in at some point? If so, where? These are the questions that interest me the most, and are ones that require answers if we are going to convince our broader audience of economists that TBL is a pedagogical technique worth considering. The study design for this project will examine one aspect of this question, which is why I am excited to be involved.

Hello Everyone. I'm Michael Latham. I teach at Collin College (a community college north of Dallas, Texas). I've been using TBL for 4 years now in Principles of Micro and Macro. I've attempted to incorporate active learning in the classroom since I first began teaching in '06, but was unfamiliar with TBL until a colleague introduced me to the literature after attending a workshop. I have experienced strong results in the classroom since my implementation of TBL, and continue to work with colleagues in other disciplines to advance TBL throughout the college. We have created a TBL Committee that has secured funding classrooms designed specifically for TBL at each campus. I am also active with both Service Learning and Learning Communities Program, and will be serving as the Director of the Honors Institute beginning this Fall.

My biggest struggle is advancing my implementation of TBL to advanced levels of learning. I find that most students need significant practice with the basic concepts / modeling even after the RAP. So it is difficult to create effective intra and inter-team dialogue over more complex problems. Basically, TBL has been very effective in advancing the computational skills but I'm working to improve the lead up to the AE's to better facilitate the evaluation of complex problems.

Outside of the classroom, I love anything outdoors - hiking, biking, paddling, etc. I have two young children and love nothing more than to load them in the car, drive across the country force them to camp and generally drive my wife crazy.

Apologies for the late introduction.
I teach economics at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, at the western edge of the Portland Metro Area.
I am half of a two-person department and teach principles of microeconomics every semester, along with intermediate micro once a year, and several elective courses on an every-other-year basis, including environmental, health, and international trade and development economics. Every few years I teach the econometrics course in the core of the economics major.
I use team-based learning in all of my classes, though the nature of the activities in each course is very different. Two of my elective courses are designated as writing-in-discipline (WID) courses for the college core, and include many more individual writing exercises and team workshopping of those "artifacts."
I have found TBL to provide a very useful structure for my courses -- in particular, students have the incentive to study well on their own and to be fully invested in the class activities. However, the downside of TBL is the workload increase relative to presenting via a doc-in-the-box pedagogy. I have been working to create a platform to share the materials that all of us have developed on our own so that we can reduce that workload over time for ourselves and potential future adopters.
The support of the NSF funding of this effort has been a tremendous boost to this effort. The work of the development team will determine the level of success of this effort. For now, we are focussed on developing resources for introductory courses. Future projects will include the creation and dissemination of more activities for intermediate and elective courses in economics.
For fun and health, I love to bicycle on the road. Forest Grove is a great place to bike, with miles and miles of lightly traveled roads through rolling hills in the surrounding area. The Portland UGB has limited sprawl in our area and has resulted in my being only a few minutes away from the countryside, where car traffic is low.
Usually, I take my family and dogs on hiking trips to the mountains or the beach fairly frequently. This summer, my life has been consumed by the process of buying one house and selling another. Moving date is July 24 and I hope to have our current house sold by September. I look forward to having both events far behind me.