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.

• Applying human-centered design processes to build successful teams

  Bethanne Altringer, Senior Preceptor in Innovation and Design and Director of the Desirability Lab, uses personalized approaches to students’ learning in courses like The Innovator's Practice: Finding, Building and Leading Good Ideas with Others and Design Survivor: Experiential Lessons in Designing for Desirability, focusing on individual-level growth that leads to team effectiveness by grading both process and product.

• Conveying large amounts of material efficiently and clarifying complex ideas

  Tyler VanderWeele, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology, uses lectures to integrate and illuminate core concepts, bringing new insights to students and sometimes for his own scholarship in the process. His courses—on religion and public health, on applied statistics, and on research design—often cross disciplinary boundaries and involve unexpected combinations of ideas. 

• Enriching learning through student-led provocation

  Though Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Lecturer on History and Literature, Public Policy, and Education, plays an integral role in class discussions for his course Stories of Slavery and Freedom, students are responsible for leading the majority of classes through an exercise McCarthy refers to as “provocation.” “The provokers do not come in and give a summary of what we’ve read or a mini-lecture about the top-line themes that might emerge from the assigned readings. I really want them to find some way to literally provoke us into conversation, get the juices flowing, and try to get all the students to think about something urgently at the outset of class.”

• Pushing students to confront limits by transforming the abstract to physical form

  In her Transformations course, Assistant Professor of Architecture Megan Panzano uses architectural design methods and concepts, and a workshop approach for giving feedback, to engage undergraduates from a wide range of concentrations. When students translate abstract ideas into physical form through a variety of materials and fabrication techniques (see photos below), they confront limits, question assumptions, and expand their problem-solving capacity.

• T3alMENA

  Through storytelling and mentorship, awardees are connecting Arab youth with leaders they look up to by hearing relatable stories and receiving guidance in Arabic.

• LovelyBooks

  Awardees plan to bring technology and research (e.g. customization of morals by parents, illustrating children directly into books to increase engagement etc) to improve the learning outcomes generated by children's picture books.

• How to improve the learning experience in core clerkships at Harvard Medical School?

  The project focuses on medical students' core clerkship experiences.

• C2B: Classroom to Boardroom

  C2B seeks to provide an immersive training program designed in close collaboration with rapidly growing industries (i.e. tech-focused companies). Awardees want to help organizations recruit and retain talents that will help increase productivity and achieve higher rate of sustainable growth.

• Life Bonus

  Awardees will work on developing early literacy, situational empathy and self-efficacy through parent-child interaction.

• New Teachers Thriving

  New Teachers Thriving seeks to train new teachers to achieve personal well-being, enabling them work better with students and leave the profession at a lower rate.