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.

• Engaging real-world stakeholders to provide feedback to students

  Jal David Mehta, Associate Professor of Education, directs students to use design thinking and interact with real-world stakeholders when making proposals to improve educational systems in his course Deeper Learning for All: Designing a 21st-Century School System. At the end of the semester, students present final projects to panels of educational experts ranging from superintendents to K-12 teachers to Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty.

• Enhancing student learning through field experience

  Gonzalo Giribet, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, takes students in his course Biology and Evolution of Invertebrate Animals (co-taught this semester with Professor Cassandra Extavour) to Panama to do fieldwork during spring break to help them see how invertebrate animals “are assembled in nature,” and how “organisms are integrated into systems.” Students incur no costs for the trip thanks to funding from the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

• In the Classroom

  Resources on in-class teaching from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, including 1) Building Rapport, 2) Classroom Contracts, 3) Active Learning, 4) Instructional Strategies, and 5) Technology and Student Distraction.

• Working with local communities to engage with global issues

  María Luisa Parra-Velasco, Senior Preceptor in Romance Languages and Literatures, requires her advanced Spanish language learners in Spanish 59: Spanish and the Community to complete four hours a week of engaged scholarship with local organizations as part of their language learning experience.

• Engaging students via field trips, near and far

  James Hanken, Professor of Biology and Director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), increases student engagement by taking students out of the traditional classroom.

• Real problems: Teaching theory through practice

  Jelani Nelson, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, assigns students real programming problems in his introductory algorithm courses, CS124Data Structures and Algorithms and CS125 Algorithms & Complexity.

• Research assignments: Teaching the production of knowledge

  Ryan Enos, Associate Professor of Government, assigns an original research project—students define a question, design a study, collect data, and present their results—in his undergraduate and graduate political science courses.

• Putting students at the helm of their learning experience

  Jon Hanson, Alfred Smart Professor of Law, saw an opportunity to improve learning by putting students in the driver's seat.

• 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.

• Teaching Decision-Making through Experiential Learning and Personalized Practice Across Disciplines

  Awardees will study how decision-making is taught and assessed across disciplines and disseminate effective teaching methods.

• AskUp: Improving learning and metacognition through learner-generated questions

  Awardees will continue development of AskUp, a free, open-source studying and learning app that leverages evidence-based techniques to enhance learning, and will evaluate the efficacy of the application’s improvement to metacognition, self-directed learning, and class performance through small randomized trials.

• Assessing learning outcomes from a novel formative assessment in a large enrollment graduate life science course

  Awardees will evaluate whether delivering a chalk talk in response to an open-ended experimental design question is an effective method to drive improvements in the general practice and articulation of experimental design, as measured through responses to subsequent written experimental design questions.

• “Making space” for interdisciplinary critical thinking

  Awardees will offer a series of interdisciplinary workshops that develop critical thinking through making.

• Virtual reality narratives in foreign language pedagogy

  Awardees will engage foreign language students in cultural and linguistic immersion through virtual reality (VR) film narratives.

• 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.

• Project Nights and open-ended design research

  Awardees will measure the effects of open-ended extracurricular projects on student learning.

• New methods for hands-on teaching in the history of technology

  Awardee developed experiential learning opportunities for students in history of technology courses, including in-class demonstration and simulation.

• Extending active classroom activities to online students

  Awardees developed methods for online students to participate in active learning exercises designed for the traditional classroom.

• Embodied learning investigation

  Awardees will investigate whether embodied class exercises, relevant to the material being taught, yield greater understanding and retention of this material compared to teaching that relies solely on demonstrations.

• Leveraging teaching assistant potential and scaling-up high-intensity experiential learning

  Awardees will conduct and analyze the data of faculty interviews to surface best practices in teaching team management, with particular attention to the role of teaching assistants in the development of high-intensity experiential learning environments.