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.

• Mutually beneficial partnerships

  Robert S. Huckman, Albert J. Weatherhead III Professor of Business Administration and Ariel Dora Stern, Poronui Associate Professor of Business Administration pair student groups with local hospitals to address challenges related to access, adoption of new delivery methods, and the quality of care in their elective course, Transforming Healthcare Delivery. This applied work is rooted in a series of cases that have been written by Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty and articles that cover broader ideas from the literature and previous research.

• Flipping the classroom for deeper student engagement and feedback on learning

  L Mahadevan, Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics in SEAS, and Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics in FAS used a 2017-2018 SEAS Learning Incubator LInc Faculty Fellowship to emphasize active learning in his Mathematical Modeling course. He implemented a flipped classroom approach to enable students to come to class with problems and questions to collaborate on, time to develop their own problems from scratch, and work on modeling with peers. The foundational arc supporting this process has students move from observations through abstraction, analysis and communication, and iteration.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• An introduction to numerical computing for undergraduates

  Awardees developed a two-week module on basic computational methods in MATLAB, lowering the barrier to use for students in courses from biology to economics.

• Calculus practitioner series: Meeting the changing needs of our students and client disciplines

  Awardees plan to design and record a multimedia series on the  interdisciplinary nature of calculus with speakers from Harvard faculty from the STEM and quantitative social science fields.

• WSI/ELP water policy learning project

  Awardees plan to involve students in a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project on water policy in an effort to use experiential and team-based learning to teach students vital professional skills.

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

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

• The use and evaluation of case-based collaborative learning to teach basic sciences at HMS

  Awardees plan to implement and evaluate a new instructional method that utilizes pre-class preparation, the case method, collaborative learning, and peer instruction.

• Exploring community differences using spatial data

  Awardees plan to create a new course that teaches students in sociology to visualize and analyze spatial data.

• HSPH Case-Based Teaching and Learning Initiative

  Case-Based Teaching and Learning Initiative provides a repository for all resources developed by and for the HSPH Case-Based Teaching and Learning Center.

• SEAS Learning Incubator

  The Learning Incubator (LInc) seeks to advance learning at SEAS and elevate SEAS as a worldwide leader in innovation in learning and teaching by: Providing a team-based infrastructure for faculty to incubate, develop and adapt novel ideas and approaches to teaching, developing a culture of scholarship of teaching and learning (including research on learning and assessment) within SEAS and FAS, and providing opportunities for faculty to learn new approaches to teaching aligned with research on how students learn

• Office of Digital Teaching and Learning

  Supports pedagogical and technical aspects of course design, development and implementation, for instructors in Extension and Summer School.

• Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning

  By supporting experimentation, innovation, and evidence-based practices, the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning seeks to create transformational learning experiences for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.