New instructor identity: Knowing yourself and knowing your audience

Abstract

Effective communication is at the heart of good teaching, and one of the central tenets of effective communication is to know your audience. What often gets less attention is the need for good teachers to know themselves and consider how they are the same, or different from, their students. To build supportive relationships with students, instructors must be aware of the beliefs and assumptions they carry into the classroom because those beliefs inevitably influence virtually every pedagogical choice that instructors make. The author of this article provides advice and resources for new instructors to interrogate the beliefs they hold about their students, about teaching, and about their own identity as an economics instructor, and includes discussion of how these beliefs may manifest in pedagogical choices.