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.

• 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.

• Implementing collaborative experimentation

  Rachel Carmody, Assistant Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, explores a burgeoning new field in her course Gut Microbiome and Human Health. The main goals are for students to develop the skills to understand how experiments are designed and conducted, and to critically evaluate existing studies and emerging research papers. Students are challenged to generate new data of their own and run experiments to investigate a predetermined hypothesis individually and collectively during the semester. They regularly discuss the results of their experiments and produce final research papers that use the collective data to explore any aspect of the hypothesis that interests them.

• Making multiple perspectives and complexities visible

  Benjamin Sommers, Professor of Health Policy and Economics, finishes his Healthcare Safety Net and Vulnerable Populations course with a debate: students are randomly assigned to roles—as senators, witnesses, or experts—and probe aspects of healthcare policy, simulating deliberations that take place on the Senate floor. Somewhat similar to real hearings, each witness makes an opening statement and then takes questions from acting Senators.

• Incorporating social support and love into the classroom

  Gretchen Brion-Meisels, Lecturer on Education, focuses on ensuring that holistic support is apparent and felt deeply in her classroom. From listing mental health resources on all her syllabi to convening opening circles to build relationships at the start of class, Brion-Meisels incorporates ways of “checking in.” In her course Establishing Loving Spaces for Learning, students are asked to keep reflective journals and share them with a peer to engage in a conversation around their experiences. “Fundamentally, my biggest goal is to normalize the idea that everyone needs support. We’re all works-in-progress, learning and growing, but also with a lot to contribute to each other’s growth.”

• 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.

• Building Teaching Professional Development for Harvard Graduate Students involved in STEMM Educational Outreach

  Awardees will create and curate professional development resources for evidence-based inclusive teaching that is specifically tailored to Harvard graduate students involved in STEMM outreach programs.

• Best models for blended learning between graduate students and professionals

  Awardees will test a series of blended learning modules designed to facilitate collaborative learning between professional and graduate students to highlight best practices in using blended learning to allow collaborative, co-education between professionals and graduate students.

• Developing a Hybrid Interprofessional Education Model to Prepare Students for Cross-Sector Problem-Solving

  Awardees will build on the award-winning HarvardX MOOC, “Improving Your Business Through a Culture of Health (COH),” to develop a scalable and transferable pilot module to practice interprofessional (cross-sector) team learning.

• Teaching Students How to Learn

  Awardees will develop an interdisciplinary STEM initiative that will enable instructors to incorporate explicit lessons to teach their students how to study and learn both inside and outside of the classroom.

• Supporting Virtual Reality Pedagogical Initiatives across Harvard

  Awardees will provide virtual reality (VR) equipment, software, and staff training for initiating and supporting innovative VR pedagogical initiatives at the Cabot Science Library VR studio.