Description: The SOA announced the top winning entries of the 2020 student research case study competition.

Description: This article studies the syllabus as a dynamic, interactive teaching tool that informs and is informed by both solutions of complex course problems and student difficulties with these problems.

Description: Article describes accomplishments as Chair during the year. Four accomplishments are mentioned: i) Actuarial Research Conference ii) Early Career Award, iii) Establishment of Outstanding Educator Award, iv) Push to create surveys from the section containing a reservoir of ideas that can be used for webinars, podcasts, etc.

Description: Writing articles is not as hard as most people think, but it does take some thought and planning. This article gives practical tips about how to put "pen to paper" and write an effective article.

Description: Traditionally the SOA formulates pedagogic excellence in terms of the Marzano Taxonomy. For example, the "analysis level" consisting of generalization, specification, classification, contrast, matching, and error identification, is considered superior to the "retrieval level" consisting of rote memorization such as recognition, recall, and using. In this presentation, we first show that pedagogic excellence can be equivalently, but more simply, formulated in terms of executive function and goal-setting. Here executive function refers to problems requiring multiple mental modalities - such as, formal, verbal, computational, and graphical - for their solution. Goal-setting refers to the skillful breakup of a complex problem into a sequence of subgoals each of which is clearly formulated, challenging, but achievable timely. Light examples from the literature illustrate these concepts. Five "challenging FM problems": reinvestment, refinancing, multiple rate/deposit problems, pricing deferred bonds using a term structure, and obscure loan problems, illustrate the following fundamental techniques of goal-setting and executive function: i) a fellowship approach to teaching preliminary exam material, ii) using subgoals to give difficult homework, iii) alternating between different mental modalities to achieve elegant brevity in solutions, iv) goal-setting reflecting familiar vs. new, and v) skillful definition of unit subgoals.

Description: This article highlights the importance of communicating concisely and effectively through email and other written forums, and when/when not to use written vs. other forms of communication.