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.

• 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.

• Using faculty videos in required courses to engage students at all levels

  Like many instructors of required courses, Pinar Dogan, Lecturer in Public Policy and SLATE Faculty Liaison for Pedagogy, teaches her section of Markets and Market Failure to students with significantly divergent levels of prior knowledge of microeconomics. Seeking a way for students “to end up at the same place even though they started at very different places,” Dogan partnered with SLATE to develop videos of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) faculty experts explaining the relevance of math-intensive or potentially dry concepts (e.g., fixed costs or price elasticity) to public policy. 

• YourCampus

  The main purpose of YourCampus is to provide an educational networking platform for prospective applicants to connect with current students from their top choice universities.

• The Growing Book

  Awardees would like to develop an app to encourage and facilitate children’s active learning and their socio-emotional development through gamified storytelling activities.

• Rise: the membership

  Rise: the membership is an online community and learning platform is for soon-to-be and recent female college grads interested in learning life skills partnered with an awareness for spiritual and personal growth.

• Meet

  Meet is a crowdsourced platform for job-seekers to share and access trusted and relevant information about employers in their local area.

• MentorMEd

  MentorMEd is a phone apps (which works almost like the dating apps) for mentorship combining mutual 'like' feature and matching tags percentage.

• TodayDream

  Phase one of TodayDream consists of a dynamic web portal to connect schools/orgs with nearby talented minorities, mobile app for participating speakers and other talented minorities to build community & foster alliances among themselves, and partnerships with corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies to provide speakers to join our community, as well as access a repository of minority talent to promote diversity in hiring.

• ColorFULL

  Awardees collaborate with educators and their students to create culturally affirming literary, audio, & visual content and curriculum

• FieldFit

  College Armor is building an online platform that seeks to incentivize and guide student-athletes to engage in non-athletic activities through a fun, interactive game.

• 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.

• MythOS

  MythOS is addressing the growing gap in social and emotional skills among adolescents who are not being served by traditional social activities (sports, theater, etc.) but are instead consumed by digital entertainment. MythOS is using games that resonate with digitally-focused adolescents to drive home social and emotional skills.

• Data Coach for Teachers

  Awardees project seeks to address this problem through an easy-to-understand and free website or software that educators could use to (a) consolidate their data, (b) analyze their data, and (c) move quickly from analysis to action-planning.

• KolaboraSIM

  Awardees plan to provide an immersive virtual reality simulation using 360-degree videos to place participants in a representation of a complex teamwork situation.

• myDev

  To tackle the problem of millennial employee turnover, awardees are working on a web-based application that focuses on professional learning development through monthly one-on-one conversations between an employee and their manager.