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.

• Conveying large amounts of material efficiently and clarifying complex ideas

  Tyler VanderWeele, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology, uses lectures to integrate and illuminate core concepts, bringing new insights to students and sometimes for his own scholarship in the process. His courses—on religion and public health, on applied statistics, and on research design—often cross disciplinary boundaries and involve unexpected combinations of ideas. 

• 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.

• Bringing the best parts of a seminar into larger courses

  When enrollment for seminar After Luther: Faith, Will, Law, and the Question of Goodness doubled last year, Michelle Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Theology, was concerned that the depth and quality of the connections—with and among students and the texts they read together—would diminish. In response, she modified some logistical elements including assigning different pairs of students to circulate brief response papers before class and then lead discussion each week.

• Interactive lecturing: High-leverage teaching practices to energize students

  Paola Arlotta, Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, creates an environment of active inquiry, experimentation, and brainstorming by employing interactive lecturing in her course, Got (New) Brain? The Evolution of Brain Regeneration.

• Problems and puzzles: Boosting engagement with interactivity

  Joshua Greene, Professor of Psychology, designs course sessions for maximum engagement by creating interactive opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to grapple with problems and challenge one another.

• 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.

• Extending active classroom activities to online students

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

• 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.

• The lecture in 21st century learning: Reconstructing and revaluing our oldest teaching asset

  Awardee plans to redesign his large lecture course based on active learning strategies but, at the same time, preserving possible benefits of the traditional lecture format.

• Development of a multimedia textbook

  Awardees plan to develop a digital textbook for an existing course.