Lecturer of HSE Perm Completes Internship at US University

Agata Lozinskaya, Senior Lecturer at the School of Economics and Finance, HSE Campus in Perm, has attended a course on Improving Economics Instruction (IEI) at the Indiana University Bloomington in the U.S.

Indiana University is one of the leading American universities. The IEI school was organized by the Yegor Gaidar Foundation and the U.S.­–Russia Foundation for Economic Advancement and the Rule of Law (USRF). The participants for the IEI programme were selected through a two-stage process. In the first stage, they completed a form, prepared their CV, a motivation letter, recommendation letters, and devised a lesson plan on economics. Agata Lozinskaya said that the experience of developing ‘Desyatochka’, an intellectual game in econometrics, helped her to come up with the lesson plan. The game was named one of the best innovations in teaching in 2015 by the HSE Fund for Educational Innovation.

During the second stage, the participants took part in a Skype interview with the competition organizers. Following these two stages, Agata Lozinskaya was one of the 12 finalists invited for an internship at Indiana University.

The internship programme was very intense and included lectures and workshops both on the methods of economics teaching and on a comparative analysis of the American and Russian educational models,  curriculum structure, and the specifics of teaching undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programmes in the U.S. The participants attended classes at the Indiana University Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning where they discussed some effective designs of courses and the peculiarities of developing online courses. ‘The class where we looked at the course we were teaching from the new perspective of one of the course design models was especially useful. I believe that it will help me optimize the structure of my classes’, Agata Lozinskaya said.

Indiana University professors also presented some new models and methods of teaching undergraduate and master’s students. ‘I was impressed not only by the techniques used in these classes, such as the use of interactive technology, but by the high level of  motivation among students’, Agata mentioned. At the end of the internship, the programme participants presented team projects, as part of which they developed a lesson on one of the basic topics taught as part of the economic disciplines for undergraduate students.