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.

• Teaching system-level thinking with an interdisciplinary lens

  Fawwaz Habbal, Executive Dean for Education and Research and Senior Lecturer on Applied Physics, and Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams, Jr. Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies, co-teach systems-level thinking. Their course, Aesthetic Pleasure and Smart Design: Janus Faces the Future, trains students to look at complex problems from the perspective of both artists and engineers. This requires the development of skills in scientific assessment and disinterested aesthetic judgment. In the spirit of Renaissance Now, an international movement to promote sustainable development, Habbal and Sommer model the combination of boldness and humility. Students in ES 27 read and reflect on material which ranges from aesthetic philosophy and history to triggers for scientific revolution. Then they tackle a complex problem through a proposal that will gain aesthetic acceptance and be scientifically effective.

• Building virtual community in a foundational class

  Much like all our faculty across the University, Dr. Tamara Kaplan, Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, shifted the pre-clinical neuroscience course, Mind, Brain, and Behavior, to a remote learning space this past year. In addition to considering curricular materials, Dr. Kaplan and her team agreed that it was especially important to think about the learning environment and students’ social connection with the material, the teaching faculty, and other students. As a result, they developed several systems to foster this social sense of community and “combat the sense of isolation and disconnectedness that can result from online learning” in her class. All course instructors recorded three-minute introductory videos about both their career/research and personal interests. Dr. Kaplan used Canvas to send students daily announcements with learning objectives, key points that came up that day in class, and friendly support. A balance of synchronous and asynchronous communication was used to minimize student burnout and make sure students stayed engaged. Finally, the team built in time for genuine connection with daily half-hour breaks between classes for students to get to know faculty and ask questions. Dr. Kaplan notes, “we realized that creating relationships with faculty is a huge driver of a positive learning environment.”

• VPAL’s Canvas Dashboards – Lessons Learned

  Zac Wang, HILT’s Senior Manager for Resources Adoption and Impact in VPAL, will discuss Canvas Dashboards-Lessons Learned, and later we will try to identify some of our community needs for Zac to bring back to VPAL.

• 2021 HILT Conference

  The 2021 annual HILT Conference will explore how we teach students to become global agents of change. Our plenary session will consider how our collective experiences in remote teaching and learning allowed us to rethink our models of instruction, community building, and curriculum. Breakout sessions will explore the various ways instructors can equip students to confront ongoing world-wide challenges through active learning, collaborative groups, and engaged scholarship.

• Designing and Teaching a Hybrid Course

  The hybrid classroom took teaching and learning world by storm as colleges and universities grappled with balancing online teaching, in-person learning, and public health considerations. With the hybrid model at the forefront of many schools' plans for return to campus in the upcoming academic year, one question looms large: how do we design and teach our courses for a hybrid classroom? How do we teach so that in-person, online, and asynchronous students all feel engaged? What lessons can we take away from this model as we return to fully on-campus teaching? In this HILT Learning Design Affinity Group Lunch & Learn event, faculty and learning designers who have worked or taught in the hybrid model space at Harvard Extension School and Harvard Kennedy School will share their best practices and takeaways.

• Canvas APIs, LTIs, Data and more!

  We are excited to welcome Gabe Abrams, Senior Software Engineer at DCE who will discuss Canvas APIs, LTIs, Data and more! Following his 20 minute presentation, we will have 10 minutes for Q&A, 10 minutes for networking in breakout rooms, followed by a wrap-up and any announcements.

• Learning Analytics Reboot

  Please join us on May 19th, 12-1 PM EDT for ‘Learning Analytics Reboot’. This will be a chance to hear what others are doing (or wondering about) with respect to learning analytics at Harvard, and of course networking! In preparation for this meeting we encourage you to read the latest EDUCAUSE 2021 Teaching and Learning Horizons Report.

• Demonstrating that everyone’s voice is valued

  Dr. Monik Jimenez, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, uses different pedagogical approaches to elevate diverse voices and styles of learning. In her Mass Incarceration & Health in the US course, she balances speaking time between a traditional scholar and an impacted community member, and emphasizes to the latter (and to students) that they are an expert. Dr. Jimenez also provides a variety of ways for students to participate and ask questions that include different cultural and neurodivergent learning styles. “It’s important to think about decolonizing the classroom in a layered way,” she reflects. “What are the multiple ways in which systems of power and white supremacy have impacted what we consider to be an ‘optimal’ student through the metrics we’ve been taught?”

• 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.

• Distracted: Using the Science of Learning to Cultivate Student Attention

  It often seems that the current generation of students is more distracted than ever, especially given the proliferation of technology at our fingertips. In the face of ever-present distractions, how can we cultivate students’ attention in order to foster deep learning? In this first meeting of the Research-Informed Teaching and Learning (RITL) Affinity Group, we will share research-based insights from James Lang’s new book Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It (2020) and collectively brainstorm applications to our own work as educators. (No need to read the book beforehand!) We will also make time to discuss future directions for this affinity group.