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.

• Establishing a rigorous and invigorating classroom

  Robert Reid-Pharr, Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African American Studies strives to create a “rigorous but not frightening” classroom experience for the course Gender, Sexuality, and the Archive, in which students take turns leading class discussion—presenting thoughts on, challenges to, and questions about course readings derived from essays they have written. With facilitation from Reid-Pharr, their peers then ask difficult questions of the discussion leader that begin to generate meaningful conversation.

• Designing Your Course

  Course design resources from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, including 1) Backward Design, 2) Functions of the Syllabus, 3) Formative ("low-stakes") vs. Summative ("high-stakes") Assessments, 4) Assignment Modalities, 5) Framing and Sequencing Assignments, and 6) Grading and Responding to Student Work.

• 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.

• 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.

• Graduate Writing Oasis

  Awardee ran a year-long Writing Oasis program, based on a successful pilot offering, to provide dedicated time and collaboration for graduate students in their dissertation writing.

• Teaching rewriting

  Awardees explored the potential impact of a writing instruction method that emphasizes the editorial and revision process, which has the potential advantages of scalability and skill transferability.

• Study of collaborative writing

  Using Virtual Machines to Track Collaborative Writing Assignments

• Online analytic reading and writing tutorial dissemination and evaluation

  Awardees plan to use usage data and impact assessments to further develop their online tutorial on analytic reading and writing.

• Harvard Writes: A digital teaching and learning platform for better undergraduate academic writing

  Awardee plans to develop a digital learning and teaching platform (“Harvard Writes”) for students and instructors to improve undergraduate academic writing by addressing the problem of knowledge transfer.

• The Connected Scholar

  Awardees plan to develop further an online tool (“The Connected Scholar”) to teach and promote academic integrity and facilitate proper citation.