This is how I teach
This month we spoke with Dr Florian Ploeckl about how he sparks his students curiosity and challenges them to become the best versions of themselves. Florian is a Senior Lecturer and Postgraduate Coursework Program Coordinator with the School of Economics and Public Policy. He is also member of the Adelaide Education Academy.
What do you like most about teaching in your discipline?
Economics, or especially the subfields I teach in, is a great combination between an empirical grounding in real-world developments and a framework to analyse and understand those developments. I do like teaching students to focus on a systematic analysis and to think about causality to distinguish what really matters and what doesn’t.
Economics as a teaching discipline is a quite broad, generalist field. We don’t have a clear-cut vocational trajectory and expectation, so students have freedom to take our methods, tools, skills, and knowledge and go into any direction they want. This flexibility, and the space to think systematically about many aspects about human behaviour and our larger environment, is something I value very much.
How would you describe your approach to teaching/your teaching philosophy?
One aspect of my teaching approach is that I like to challenge students. The idea is to give them a solid grounding about concepts, tools, methods, and ideas, but then challenge them to push beyond that. This challenge and push also includes for them to discover and look at different viewpoints, so moving beyond the textbook. The intention is to find a good balance between equipping them with solid foundations, yet leave enough space to develop their own understanding and viewpoints on issues and historical developments.
What is your favourite way to use technology to enhance learning?
“Clickers”, or more precisely the polling function in Echo360. I have used it quite extensively in almost all of my courses for a couple of years. My use is also contagious as I have successfully proselytized this technology to some of my colleagues in my school.
More conceptually, I also have a technology driven approach to use data visualization to enhance learning. This includes using various software packages, including R, to teach practical data handling and visualization skills as an element of course, but always with the intention to directly put those lessons to good use by linking the data and visualizations tightly with the core content material.
2019 graduation lunch with Australian Award students in 2019 (pictured is a cohort of Master of Applied Economics students).
How does you teaching help prepare students for their future?
One of my central ideas is to get students interested in research and the curiosity for new knowledge underlying that. The idea is that this curiosity and push beyond the basic expectations can be put to good use by them in many situations and so serves them well in the future.
With the recent push of the university towards Work-Integrated Learning I am also beginning to reframe that central idea of research curiosity into a more visible work-related framework. This includes practical learning activities that channels research into recognizable work-related activities, giving a students a better understanding of how the underlying curiosity is a valuable tool for their future.