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.

• Cultivating the skill and the orientation to listen

  Joshua Margolis, James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration, demands of himself intensive listening while teaching, and asks the same from students: “When I listen really carefully it allows me to push students hard and help them see what they have within themselves.”

• Difficult topics: Seeking and considering alternative viewpoints in the classroom

  Meira Levinson, Professor of Education, develops case studies about difficult questions in educational ethics—for example, grade inflation, charter schools, and policies that disproportionately impact low-income students of color—for A203 Educational Justice students to debate and discuss the ethical dimensions of educational practice and policy.

• Student case pedagogy: Learning from their own experience

  Ronald Heifetz, Co-Founder of the Center for Public Leadership and King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer of Public Leadership, uses experiential teaching methods like student case analysis—where students collaboratively develop and analyze cases drawn from their own work experiences—to promote deeper engagement and stronger retention of leadership concepts.

• From the source: Guest speakers in the classroom

  David Garvin, C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration,utilizes guest speakers in General Management: Processes and Action in order to promote deeper understanding of managerial and organizational realities.

• Defining learning objectives: Pre-semester, all semester

  José A. (Tony) Gómez-Ibáñez, Derek C. Bok Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, who holds appointments at the GSD and HKS, defines the learning objectives of his course prior to the start of the semester and references them to frame each individual class session: “I use the first five minutes to place each class in the course – ‘The last class we talked about X and today we want to see how those ideas might apply to Y.’”

• Elevating class conversation: Taking a case-based approach

  Nancy Kane, Professor of Management and Associate Dean of Case-based Teaching and Learning at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, trains instructors on using the teaching case to lead effective course discussions.

• Choice architecture: When students become designers of optimal decision processes

  Awardee will develop in-class and online activities to improve student decision-making and increase classroom engagement.

• Transforming team-learning teaching cases in public health for online platforms: an e-learning module development project

  Awardees transformed STRIPED teaching cases for online delivery, consistent with digital learning research and toward expanded outreach to working professionals.

• From text to multimedia: Evaluating a scalable enhancement model for problem-based learning

  Awardees will conduct a comparison study to identify the impact of multimedia enhancements of case materials on student preparation and engagement.

• Geospatial education at Harvard: A new course in mapping and spatial perspectives

  Awardees developed a new course on spatial reasoning, cartography, and geographic analysis.