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.

• The hidden curriculum: Engaging students on another level

  Bernhard Nickel, Professor of Philosophy, engages students in his introductory College courses about the “hidden curriculum”—defined here as the social and disciplinary norms often invisible to both students and the teaching staff, including expectations about class preparation, in-session focus, respectful discussion behavior, and the role of feedback.

• 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.

• Feedback vs. evaluation: Getting past the reluctance to deliver negative feedback

  When Dr. Keith Baker, Associate Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Anesthesia Residency Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, gives medical residents feedback, he emphasizes a “learning orientation” (where the goal is mastery), rather than a “performance orientation” (where the goal is validation of abilities).

• Teachly: A research project

  Teachly was developed at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) to help faculty members teach more inclusively and effectively. The tool enables faculty to get to know their students and interact with them in a meaningful way through the robust data infrastructure.

• Team-based learning in the humanities

  Awardee will redesign a course with team-based learning (TBL) principles and assess the benefits and challenges of the approach.

• Revision history analytics in service of analyzing the writing process

  Awardees analyzed revision patterns in student writing, how they relate to activities within specific passages of a written text, and how revision-history analytics can play a role in supporting teaching and improvement in writing skills.

• Creating real-time connections in online courses

  Awardees evaluated types of interactivity between faculty and students and generated a resource guide of best practices to assist instructors in interacting with online and residential students in Canvas.

• Understanding the relationship between instructor performance and advice quality

  Awardees will investigate the relationship between instructor performance and advice quality by comparing instructor performance on a series of web-based modules and the performance of “students” who completed the modules with instructor advice.

• Capture50: A tool to facilitate peer review and assessment

  Awardees will provide a low-cost tool that automatically captures video of instructors, facilitating more robust peer review and frequent opportunity for pedagogical assessment.

• Expanding existing innovative program for assessing student learning in hands-on innovation courses

  Expanding existing innovative program for assessing student learning in hands-on innovation courses. Awardee plans to advance methods for better assessing how teams interact and ideas develop during experiential learning in multi-disciplinary engineering classes focused on design and innovation.