Teaching is an integral part of my academic personality and one of the unique aspects of the Center's approach to teaching environmental policy  is to divide the material into several distinct modules: Air, Water, Land, Forests & Soils, Biodiversity, Agriculture & Fisheries, Industry, Energy and Human Health. I will be teaching two courses dealing with these modules that run through the year. Tools for Analysis describes the tools used by economists in the context of environmental policy-making. In order to critique and analyze the application of these tools, students take Societal Responses, one-half of which is taught by my colleague Joanne Fox-Przeworski and the other half by me. 

As a graduate student at Berkeley, I assisted in the teaching of several diverse courses. These included microeconomics, development economics, game theory, environmental economics and econometrics. I taught at three different levels at Berkeley – tutor, graduate student instructor and instructor and had the opportunity to deal with students of varied backgrounds and abilities. In all settings, I consistently achieved a score significantly higher than the mean. In 1997 I was given the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award for excellence in teaching development economics. In Fall 2000 my median evaluation score was 7 (on a 7-point scale) when I taught Game Theory to a class of 75 students.

While I go to great lengths in carefully constructing the details of the material, my pedagogical style is focused on showing students the inter-relatedness of its different parts and the broad general themes that emerge from it. In step with viewing economics as a scientific endeavor, my objective as a teacher is to facilitate students in acquiring the important skills that will let them answer questions of a positivist nature. One of the hallmarks of effective teaching is to enable students to see the larger framework the details of which they are required to master. This helps them not only get a firmer grasp of the material but also enjoy the learning process. The discovery of a single unifying conceptual thread encourages students to not learn the material by rote but instead understand the intuition underlying economic models. 

An example of such an idea is marginalism. Once it is demonstrated to students that marginalism is a valid way of making optimal decisions in a resource-scarce environment, it is easy for them to understand the optimization rules adopted in various economic settings. For example, in a single good setting, consumers equate the marginal benefit of a good to its price, which is its marginal cost to them. This logic can be easily extended to multi-good settings. A competitive firm equates price (its marginal benefit) to marginal cost. While hiring workers, firms hire workers up to the point the marginal revenue product of a worker (its marginal benefit) equals the wage (its marginal cost). It is my goal that students recognize the common thread that unifies each of these equilibrium conditions in a fundamental way viz. through the idea of marginalism.

The strategy that I use to attain this objective is straightforward. I briefly introduce the idea of marginalism in the first or second lecture, giving various examples to drive home the underlying concept of rationality. After that point, each time an equilibrium condition is encountered in the course I refer to the ideas discussed at the beginning of the semester. I ask students to demonstrate how the specific equilibrium condition in question is a manifestation of marginalism. Doing this repeatedly and in varied settings helps them understand its power and potency. At a pragmatic level, students have sometimes been able to answer questions on exams based mostly on working out the equilibrium conditions from first principles.

In addition to the effort I put in the classroom, I also make good use of new and innovative technologies. I have setup websites for the courses I have taught to post extra handouts, which enhance the learning process by either giving background information on the lecture or clarifying key points. The websites also help students by providing links to other sites that contain pertinent information about the material at hand. For example, while studying the idea of brinkmanship in game theory, I posted a link to a news report printed in the New York Times about the crisis in the Middle East in which both sides accused each other of being inflexible during the negotiations and of increasing the likelihood of a violent outbreak.