Economics departments face increasing pressure to improve the quality of undergraduate instruction (William E. Becker, 2000). A teachertraining program (TTP) is one strategy departments can use to improve the quality of teaching. A TTP typically targets graduatestudent teaching assistants (TA’s) but can also provide valuable education to new junior faculty. The task set for this paper is to describe the ideal TTP. What is ideal is a matter of opinion. Mine is based on long experience with the TTP at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, on familiarity with TTP’s at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Indiana University, and Purdue University, and on my experience as director of teaching workshops sponsored by the AEA Committee on Economic Education (Salemi et al., 1996). I begin with principles that should guide creation of a TTP, describe a TTP’s essential elements, and conclude with a consideration of resource issues.

The Committee sponsored two sessions at the 2000 ASSA meetings.The first session, "Teaching Macroeconomic Principles," was organized by Michael Salemi

As Phillip Cagan pointed out, hyperinflation provides the opportunity to study monetary phenomena in a situation where increases in nominal quantities dwarf changes in real quantities. The large changes in prices, moreover, surely create sizeable incentives to predict as well as possible the changes in these prices. Thus a central feature of a model of asset supply and demand in hyperinflation is the way in which agents are assumed to form their expectations. In a recent article in this Review, Jacob Frenkel proposed to infer from the data on spot and forward deutsche mark exchange the onemonth future rate of inflation expected in Germany during the post-World War I hyperinflation. The major virtue of such an approach, suggested Frenkel, was that it depended on observable market prices rather than mechanistic formulae to generate agents' guesses as to the opportunity cost of holding money. Frenkel based his conclusion that foreign exchange data could be used to measure inflation expectations on evidence that during the hyperinflation the market in deutsche mark exchange functioned efficiently. He based his conclusion that exchange markets were efficient on his estimates of two regressions:

During the first fifty years of the American Economic Association (AEA), its leaders considered the teaching of economics to be an important subject for discussion and debate. AEA founders set as a goal ... to educate public opinion about economic questions and economic literature (Elton Hinshaw and Siegfried, 1991 p. 373). During the last 50 years, AEA leaders have largely ceded questions on teaching to specialists. In 1955, the Association created the Committee on Economic Education (CEE) and charged it with improving the status of economic within the profession, stimulating and encouraging professional work on economic education, and arranging economics-education sessions at the AEA meetings. The Association later revised the charge to include actively ... improving the quality of economic at all levels, from pre-college to college, adult and general economic education (Hinshaw and Siegfried, 1991). It is time to direct the attention of the entire profession, not just economic specialists, toward the importance of educating a broad spectrum of the public about economics.

Use It or Lose It: Teaching Literacy in the Economics Principles Course by W. Lee Hansen, Michael K. Salemi and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 92, issue 2, pages 463-472 of American Economic Review, May 2002

Research in Economic Education: Five New Initiatives by Michael K. Salemi, John J. Siegfried, Kim Sosin, William B. Walstad and Michael Watts. Published in volume 91, issue 2, pages 440-445 of American Economic Review, May 2001