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• The Spark of Learning – Energizing and Motivating Students in Uncertain Times

  Dr. Sarah Rose Cavanagh will bring to bear empirical evidence from the study of education, psychology, and neuroscience to argue that if you want to capture students’ attention, enhance their motivation, harness their working memory, bolster their long-term retention, and encourage habits related to good mental health, you should consider the emotional impact of your teaching style and course design. In this 75-minute session, participants will be invited to engage with practical examples of activities and assignments that are rooted in this research and to think about implications of these research-based insights for their own practice.

• Centering student need in gateway courses to the field

  Dr. Carmen Messerlian, Assistant Professor of Environmental Reproductive, Perinatal, and Pediatric Epidemiology, remodeled the department’s gateway Reproductive and Perinatal Epidemiology I course after her first year teaching it. Drawing on key observations and 6-8 hours of one-on-one student meetings per week, “I wanted to understand students’ learning needs and requirements, their goals for the course, and where their training was going to take them.” From there, she synthesized both her own experience in the field and quantitative student review data to radically revise the course’s structure. Now the course helps students develop their scientific research skills, explicitly scaffolding how to perform activities that students rarely get formal training in, like academic journal peer reviews, abstract writing, and poster presentations. At its core, the course trains students “how to become a reproductive epidemiologist,” and to learn how to put on “an epidemiological lens” when they produce, digest, or evaluate material in the field.

• Student Success Initiatives

  Please join the HILT Learning Design affinity group on April 28th at 12PM ET for a webinar on recent student success initiatives featuring colleagues from across the Harvard University community. Each of the panel’s presenters will share experiences from the past year related to work supporting their respective learner audiences, along with the challenges and future opportunities this unexpected and prolonged disruption has presented.

• Policy and practice: Learning data in learning design

  Topic: Policy and practice: Learning data in learning design. Speakers: Evan Sanders, Associate Director of Curriculum Services (HMS); Cynthia Deng, candidate for Master in Architecture and Master of Urban Planning, 2021 (GSD); Milos Mladenovic, candidate for Master in Architecture, 2020 (GSD); Tara Abbatello, Teaching and Learning Specialist, Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning (HBS); and Carol Kentner, Digital Scholarship Librarian, Gutman Library (HGSE)

• Instructional Moves

  IM spotlights reflective instructors from across the university using high-leverage teaching strategies applicable to multiple settings and grounded in teaching and learning research. Moves are anchored in videos that combine class footage with reflections from instructors and students, and these videos are supplemented by relevant research on the move’s efficacy, tips for enacting this move in diverse settings, and related resources that facilitate deeper exploration.

• Usable Knowledge

  A digital publication based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education produced for educators everywhere. Usable Knowledge was founded to connect research to practice. They make education research and well-vetted strategies accessible to a wide audience: teachers and principals, district leaders, policymakers, university faculty and higher ed professionals, nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs, members of the media, and parents.

• We are all Educators: Piloting a Workshop to Prepare University Staff to Act as Effective Educators

  Awardees will create resources and a workshop that will enable staff members to more effectively act as educators when working with students on formal and informal projects.

• Helping students see themselves as scientists

  When Dr. Kevin Eggan, Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, did research as an undergraduate, it “transformed for me what science was and what it could be.” His Precision Genetics and Gene Therapy year-long course offers sophomores a similar opportunity. In the fall, students are introduced to a “jamboree of recent medical discoveries in Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).” Working in small groups, they explore and then choose a gene to focus on. In the spring, they continue in small groups to experiment on mice, learn tools for analyzing the data they generate, and present to their peers, instructors, and external experts along the way.

• DEEP Career

  DEEP Career strives to “Deliver Equal and Endless Possibilities” for young professionals’ career development in China, where accredited career opportunities are concentrated in Beijing and Shanghai, but young talents elsewhere are excluded.

• Bonsai

   Bonsai is a personalized and adaptive solution that develops SEL skills in middle school students by encouraging them to engage in microlearning activities.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• “Making space” for interdisciplinary critical thinking

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

• Project Nights and open-ended design research

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

• Digital Teaching Fellow program

  Awardees will expand the digital teaching fellow program from one to at least seven departments in the humanities and social sciences, pairing students with faculty to develop a variety of course-related digital projects, encouraging pedagogical experimentation in digital active learning, multi-media assignments, and unique faculty-student collaboration.

• A Virtual public forum and online resource platform for speaking and communication

  Awardees will film a series of interviews (inspired by "Harvard Writes") to convene a campus-wide conversation on the role of spoken communication in teaching, scholarship, and collaboration.

• 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.

• Understanding the teaching brain

  Define core components of the "teaching brain"

• Graduate multimedia fellows program

  Awardees plan to organize a graduate multimedia fellows program that trains teaching fellows to evaluate and advise students’ on multimedia projects.

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