Into Practice, a biweekly communication distributed from the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning to active instructors during the academic year was inspired by a successful 2012 HILT grant project. The e-letter highlights the pedagogical practices of individual faculty members from across Schools and delivers timely, evidence-based teaching advice, contributing to and strengthening a University-wide community of practice around teaching.

Below is a catalog of all the Into Practice issues sorted by the publication date. To subscribe to Into Practice, please sign-up via our Mailing List page.

• Moving from passive learning to active exploration of the physical world

  Scott Edwards, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), makes extensive use of the museum’s ornithology collections in his courses and brings specimens into his lecture sessions to engage students in close analysis during weekly three-hour labs. Edwards models “ways of making meaning” by looking to specimens as key evidence for testing claims and theories.

• Easy Innovations

  A product of the 2016 HILT Annual Conference, Easy Innovation is a collection of small-scale teaching innovations shared by Harvard faculty.

• Applying the science of behavior change to lesson planning

  Todd Rogers, Professor of Public Policy, teaches students in MLD304 The Science of Behavior Change to leverage insights about human decision making and develop interventions through carefully constructed class activities and facilitated discussion, such as randomized experiments and think-pair-share brainstorms, respectively.

• Leveraging student heterogeneity to bridge gaps through active learning

  Marianne Wessling-Resnick, Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry, employs active learning strategies including debate, ‘pair and share,’ and peer evaluation to bridge gaps in student experience and knowledge.

• Setting up effective feedback loops: The role of assessment in course transformation

  Logan McCarty, Director of Physical Sciences Education, and Louis Deslauriers, Director of Science Teaching and Learning, adopted an active pedagogy for a large introductory physics course and saw significant gains in student learning and attitudes.

• Getting the most out of classroom space

  Melissa Franklin, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, rethought her teaching by rethinking her classroom. She created a flexible classroom, “the SciBox,” to encourage active learning, greater engagement, and student ownership.

• The hiccups, humility, and benefits of deciding to flip a course

  Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science, flipped part of her course, CS161, “Operating Systems."

• Hedera: A personalized vocabulary database and readability gauge

  Hedera facilitates the application of second language acquisition research to teaching and learning by enabling users to maintain custom lists of known vocabulary and analyzing texts to see what percentage of words the user knows.

• Making “Inclass” into a campus-wide educational technology app store

  Awardee will scale the availability of the SEAS educational technology (edtech) app store across the University.

• Development of Student-run Podcasts as an Innovative Learning and Communication Tool

  Awardees will develop training workshops to teach students to communicate technical knowledge to broader audiences through podcasting.