Teaching

Harvard Graduate School of Education (Graduate Students), Lead Instructor


HGSE A217A: Economics of Higher Education: Access, Outcomes, and Competition

Course Creator and Lead Instructor with Jorge Encinas, Spring 2022


Description: The purpose of this course is to teach important frameworks from economics and other social sciences to aid in our understanding of higher education trends and challenges. Many of the challenges facing higher education in the United States originate from scarce resources. These include limited individual and family resources to pay increasing tuition, accessible information on enrollment and quality, and institutional competition for public funding. This scarcity creates a higher education landscape where access is limited, and individuals and institutions compete for resources for their own desired outcomes. Economic theory and research offers perspectives on how individuals and institutions can make optimal decisions under scarcity. This course will utilize frameworks and theories from economics to better understand the costs, benefits, and incentives institutions and students face. Utilizing economic frameworks such as human capital and signaling theory, opportunity costs, optimization under resource constraints, and information asymmetry, we will understand historical and current higher education issues related to access, finance, quality, and accountability, and interrogate where change might be possible. This course focuses on American institutions and explores how these topics vary across institution types – from local community colleges to national research universities. We will also include international examples where possible. Students will also learn the basic principles of research while discussing and critiquing recent studies and reports.


Syllabus



HGSE EVI101: Evidence

Lead Instructor with Marty West (Summer 2022) and Ann Mantil (Summer 2023)

Note: This course is required for all incoming master's students and Doctor of Education Leadership (Ed.L.D.) students at HGSE.


Description: The dilemmas we face as education professionals seeking to advance equity and opportunity require us to make sense of, evaluate, and prioritize different kinds of evidence. This course equips students with the foundational skills and knowledge they’ll need to interpret the most common forms of evidence—both qualitative and quantitative—and apply them to their practice. We ground our exploration of these issues in a persistent, pervasive, and provocative challenge: improving equity in literacy outcomes for grade 3 to 5 students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina. We will use evidence to frame the problem of educational inequity, evaluate the quality and relevance of the evidence about possible solutions, and consider what additional evidence we would need to strengthen our conclusions. The course uses an innovative team-based learning pedagogy, including “flipped” lectures, whole class discussion, and small-group activities. By the end of the course, students will be able to weigh the unique affordances of different types of evidence in making decisions about complex educational dilemmas and will acquire a powerful set of tools for analyzing and applying evidence to improve education systems.


Syllabus



Harvard Graduate School of Education (Graduate Students), Teaching Fellow


HGSE S057: Using Data in Organizations

Teaching Fellow for Carrie Conaway, Spring 2021 & Spring 2022


HGSE S052: Intermediate & Advanced Statistical Methods for Applied Education Research

Teaching Fellow for Andrew Ho, Spring 2021


HGSE BA701: Creating the Future of American Postsecondary Education

Teaching Fellow for Francesca Purcell, Fall 2020 & Fall 2022


HGSE A710S: Ethical Questions in Higher Education

Teaching Fellow for Brian Rosenberg, Winter 2021


HGSE S040: Introductory & Intermediary Statistics for Educational Research

Teaching Fellow for Joe McIntyre, Fall 2020


HGSE A710D: The College Admissions Process: Practice, Policy, & Research

Teaching Fellow for Julie Vultaggio, Fall 2019



Northwestern University (Undergraduate Students), Teaching Assistant


COMM_ST 395: Theory & Practice of Community Engagement

Student Instructor for Paul Arntson, Summer 2014


INTL_ST 390: Development in the Global Context

Student Instructor for Brian Hanson, Summer 2014



Course Evaluations available upon request.