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.

• A balancing act: Making established courses your own

  Karin Öberg, Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Astronomy, taught departmental introductory course Stellar and Planetary Astronomy in 2016 by building on established material and modifying the curriculum using student feedback and her own observational assessment.

• Engaging students in a course postmortem dialogue

  Alfred Guzzetti, Osgood Hooker Professor of Visual Arts, dedicates the final session of VES 52R: Introduction to Non-Fiction Videomaking—where students spend the term creating one nonfiction film on a subject of their choosing—to a class-wide postmortem discussion about all course elements.

• Nuanced assessments: More than the final grade

  Howell Jackson, James S. Reid Jr. Professor of Law, experiments with end-of-semester exams and writing assignments to create opportunities for meaningful, formative feedback through skills practice, reflection, and peer collaboration.

• Setting up effective feedback loops: The role of assessment in course transformation

  Logan McCarty, Director of Physical Sciences Education, and Louis Deslauriers, Director of Science Teaching and Learning, adopted an active pedagogy for a large introductory physics course and saw significant gains in student learning and attitudes.

• The hiccups, humility, and benefits of deciding to flip a course

  Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science, flipped part of her course, CS161, “Operating Systems."

• 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.

• Helping students and faculty to optimize preparation for the flipped classroom: using efficiency metrics

  Awardee will use efficiency metrics to study the best preparation methods for a flipped classroom.

• 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.

• Choice architecture: When students become designers of optimal decision processes

  Awardee will develop in-class and online activities to improve student decision-making and increase classroom engagement.