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.

• Understanding pathophysiology with real-life vignettes

  Barbara Cockrill, Harold Amos Academy Associate Professor of Medicine, uses case-based collaborative learning (CBCL) in her Homeostasis I course to help medical students explore real-life clinical scenarios they may face as practitioners. Case discussions start in cohorts of four students, formed at the beginning of the course, and focus on a series of questions. Discussion continues with the full class of 40 students, facilitated by Cockrill and other medical school faculty.

• Engaging students in a field-based, problem-oriented, experiential course

  Jorrit de Jong, Lecturer in Public Policy, combines practice, research, and engagement with learning and teaching in his course Innovation Lab: Public Problem Solving in Massachusetts Cities, in which students participate in a field-based, problem-oriented, and experiential setting, immersed in local city governments. Students observe, first-hand, the work of public servants—going on inspection tours, triaging cases, analyzing geo-spatial data, reconciling competing priorities and politics—and then pitch proposals to city mayors, usually building on the work of previous students.

• Science Bytes

  Science Bytes Awardees: Ragini Lall (HGSE) and Aditi Kumar (MIT-Engineering) Summary: coming soon.

• Open Minds

  Our solution is to create open education resources (OER) so that all teachers have access to free, K-12 TEKs-aligned curricula designed through research-based culturally, community responsive and anti-bias frameworks.

• Mosaic

  Mosaic Awardees: Erick Diaz (GSD), Sascha Pellerin (HGSE), and Joshua Baltodano (HKS) Summary: Mosaic supports first-generation college students applying to graduate school through a comprehensive and individualized coaching model. Our coaches, who are first-gen themselves, walk applicants through the key aspects of an application (e.g., resumes, personal statements, and selecting recommendors) and provide detailed feedback […]

• Innovate for Africa

  Innovate for Africa (IFA) is a nonprofit organization that provides graduating STEAM students in Nigeria 1-month training on entrepreneurial and labour-demanded skills as well as support throughout a subsequent 11-month placement at an innovation driven start-up.

• InCompass.ed

  InCompass.ed offers transformational leadership programs for young people to develop authentic purpose.

• Hackademic

  Hackademic Awardees: Sajeev Popat (HKS) and Ian Davenport (GSAS) Summary: Hackademic is a software platform that helps PhD students in academia prepare for and start full-time data science careers in industry.  We’re developing a sell guided training platform that takes academics from research to industry without internships, bootcamps, or MOOCs.

• Debate Spaces

  Debate Spaces Awardees: Matt Summers (HLS), Tessa Holtzman (External), Courtney Foster (External), and Maya Benzinger (External) Summary:Debate Spaces uses a unique, scalable, debate-centered curriculum to equip middle school students to be civically-engaged, active, and connected members of their local communities. We emphasize three critical components in our curriculum: quick critical thinking that relies on hard […]

• Lowering the barriers to becoming a practitioner

  Lily Song, Lecturer and Research Associate, divides her course, Community Development: History, Theory, and Imaginative Practice, into three sections. In “Unraveling,” students read theoretical texts about community development and interrogate dominant approaches that uphold race, class, and gender-based supremacies. “Revisiting” immerses students in alternative histories of community development, drawing on various liberation struggles and movements. Finally, “praxis” brings community development practitioners to present and discuss their work. The course seeks to create a peer-learning community that pushes past remedial and reformist approaches to community development in order to intervene on prevailing economic, political, social, and spatial structures and processes that lock communities in denigrating and dehumanizing terms. By showcasing and interrogating work being done in the field, it breaks down students’ barriers to entry.