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.

• 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.

• Identifying knowledge gaps through illustrations

  Dr. Carl Novina, Associate Professor of Medicine, and his co-instructor Shannon Turley, amended the traditional graduate seminar Critical Reading for Immunology to teach students comprehension and presentation skills essential to a career in biomedical science.

• 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.

• SLab 2.0

  With Advance Grant funding, Rehding established regular lab meetings to refine the goals of SLab 2.0, updated equipment in the lab to accommodate the increased usage of the space, designed a website to host a repository of digital projects and to highlight current student projects, and hosted masterclasses open to the Harvard community.

• 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.

• Transforming team-learning teaching cases for online platforms: scaling up an e-learning module development project to expand reach across Harvard and to public health professionals in field settings

  Awardees will extend the transformation of traditional to online cases across Harvard by developing a new e-module for delivering teaching cases on-line to public health professionals in field settings, and convening a cross-Harvard workshop to share best practices.

• 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.

• Project Nights and open-ended design research

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

• Bridging the gap between statistics courses and practice

  Awardee bridged the gap between statistics courses and students’ ability to implement concepts in their own work with a student-run consulting service to be permanently housed in the Biostatistics Department.

• 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.