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Welcome Speech to the Incoming Master's Candidates

I am pleased to have the opportunity to talk with you today as you embark on what I hope will be an extraordinarily valuable set of experiences at HGSE.  My faculty colleagues and I will do our best to make this happen. I want to spend my time with you talking about teaching.  Since I have been at HGSE for a long time, I am frequently asked by new colleagues what they should do to teach well.  I want to share with you three pieces of advice I give to them. The first is that you cannot be too well organized.  I explain that HGSE students work hard and try to do what we as faculty ask of them.  However, they do this in at least four courses and often while juggling the demands of a part-time job and family.  Consequently, they need to be able to plan.  Knowing just what the assignments are, when they are due, which readings will be discussed on which day, and when exams will be given and in what format is critical to students’ efforts to manage complicated lives. I was reminded of this a number of years ago by a question a student named Molly posed to me on the first day of microeconomics class.  Molly had seen on the reading list that the final assignment was a take-home exam in the middle of January with a three-day turn-around.  She explained that a condition of the part-time job that kept her afloat financially was spending January in Katmandu, Nepal.  Molly wondered if she could take the exam there.  I asked her to find out whether Katmandu had web access and overnight mail service.  It turned out to have both.  So Molly downloaded the exam from the web, and send us her answers from Katmandu – and good answers they were.  My sense is that if the details of the final assignment had not been available to Molly on the first day of class, she would not have taken the course.  And, of course, I think everyone should learn how knowledge of economics can help them to pursue their career goals in education. My second piece of advice to new colleagues is that they should provide many different types of assessments.  The reason is that some students thrive on in-class exams; others on memos; others in class discussion; others on group presentations.  The more different types of assessments that are used in a class, the more likely it will be that each student can display her own form of excellence.  I was reminded of this a number of years ago when a student named Elaine took microeconomics with me.  One of the assignments each year is that every student be part of a group of four or five that prepares and presents in eight minutes the essential argument in one of the readings.  Most groups give Powerpoint presentations.  The paper Elaine’s group was assigned to present made the argument that most American high school students have only modest incentives to work hard in school.   Elaine decided to write a play that would convey the lessons of the article.  Elaine’s script was both powerful and hilarious. Under her direction, the acting was inspired.  Everyone in the class remembered poignantly the argument of this paper.  Perhaps more important, Elaine’s work reminded us all of the power of the arts – even in conveying lessons about economics – a field that the 19th century Historian Thomas Carlyle called “The Dismal Science.” My third piece of advice is to set high standards for the quality of work students should submit; provide clear feedback about the strengths and limitations of students’ work products, assign grades of B+ to work products that are solid responses to the assignment, and reserve grades higher than B+ for work that is truly distinguished.  I explain that I have two reasons for this advice on grading practices.  First, a challenge you all face as you prepare to build a career is to figure out something that you like to do AND that you are particularly good at doing.  Honest feedback about the quality of work you do in different classes is critical to helping you distinguish between things you are very good at doing and things you like to do but do not do especially well. (I have lots of things in that category.)  This distinction is critical to finding rewarding professional work in competitive job markets. The second reason for providing honest feedback on grades is to provide you with clear signals about what kind of a letter of recommendation you can expect.  If you earn a grade of A, I believe you have a right to expect a recommendation indicating that you did exceptionally fine work.  If a faculty member gives everyone in your class a grade of A, then he must fall into one of two traps.  Either he writes essentially the same recommendation for everyone, in which case the letter he writes for you is quite worthless.  Or he writes letters that distinguish between students in the quality of their work in ways that are not reflected in the grades he assigned.  This does not seem fair to the students who expect a very strong recommendation to follow a grade of A, but don’t get it. I am reminded of the grading and feedback and recommendation issues every year when we do doctoral admissions.  Over time, my colleagues and I on the admissions committee have learned that recommendations from different faculty mean different things.  We have learned to discount heavily letters from professor X at an institution I will not name.  Professor X has written recommendation letters for at least seven different applicants to our doctoral program in the last few years.  Every one of the seven or more letters stated that the applicant was one of the two best students Professor X had taught in the past decade.  You can see why we cannot give much weight to such letters. In contrast, we have learned that when Professor Y tells us that an applicant is really special, we should always take her.  We do this because the very few times Professor Y has made a similar glowing recommendation in the past, the students really have been extraordinary. So, in summary, my suggestions to my new colleagues are: organize well, provide a variety of opportunities for students to excel, and provide honest feedback. After reading the syllabi for the 20 new courses that my new colleagues are teaching this year, I have no doubt that they are finding effective ways to implement these suggestions.  You will be the beneficiaries of their efforts.  I hope you have a wonderful year with us on Appian Way.

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