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.

• Using a student cohort to test and innovate new training materials

  Tyler Giannini and Susan Farbstein, Clinical Professors of Law, pull back the curtain on pedagogy for students in the seminar Advanced Skills Training in Strategic Human Rights Advocacy by making them part of a learning community and giving them ownership over the learning process. For example, each year students work to improve simulations in which they originally were participants, in an earlier prerequisite seminar attached to the International Human Rights Clinic.

• Education Innovation Showcase

  The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) held its inaugural Education Innovation Showcase on Thursday, April 11 at the Harvard Innovation Labs. More than 100 people gathered to hear learn about 30 projects designed to enhance teaching and learning, sponsored by HILT. Read a synopsis of the event featured in The Harvard Gazette! 

• 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.”

• 2019 HILT Spark Grants Kick-off + Networking Event

  February 7, 2019  3:30pm-5:30pm Discovery Bar, Cabot Science Library.  Come and learn about HILT's Spark Grants for faculty and staff. This event is in advance of our spring 2019 application deadline to help potential applicants hear tips on how what make successful HILT Spark projects, meet recent awardees, and network to find potential teammates and collaborators.

• Data Science and Applied Statistics Education Workshop

  Friday, January 25th | 10:00am—3:00pm in CGIS Belfer Case Study Room. Co-sponsored by the Harvard Data Science Initiative, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity, this event will focus on data science and applied statistics and bring together a select set of faculty, student teaching fellows, and staff to: Illuminate how these domains are taught and learned in various ways across Harvard; Demonstrate tools recently developed to support that pedagogical work; Share results of cross-University curriculum mapping efforts in these domains; Meet colleagues from other departments and schools who are teaching similar content

• 2018 HILT Conference

  The 2018 HILT Conference was held on Friday, September 21 in Wasserstein Hall. The annual event is designed to engage the Harvard community in a university-level dialogue about teaching and learning innovation.

• Learning Spaces Week at Harvard

  Learning Spaces Week at Harvard convened June 8 – 11, 2015 with over 200 Harvard affiliates participating in an event similar to an academic scavenger hunt. Participants were given a suggested itinerary to tour various learning spaces around Harvard University in Cambridge, Allston, and the Longwood Medical Campus. Each of the 23 locations provided demonstrations on the use of the space or enabled participants to tour via an open-house style.

• Easy Innovations

  A product of the 2016 HILT Annual Conference, Easy Innovation is a collection of small-scale teaching innovations shared by Harvard faculty.

• Teaching Decision-Making through Experiential Learning and Personalized Practice Across Disciplines

  Awardees will study how decision-making is taught and assessed across disciplines and disseminate effective teaching methods.

• AskUp: Improving learning and metacognition through learner-generated questions

  Awardees will continue development of AskUp, a free, open-source studying and learning app that leverages evidence-based techniques to enhance learning, and will evaluate the efficacy of the application’s improvement to metacognition, self-directed learning, and class performance through small randomized trials.

• Transforming team-learning teaching cases for online platforms: scaling up an e-learning module development project to expand reach across Harvard and to public health professionals in field settings

  Awardees will extend the transformation of traditional to online cases across Harvard by developing a new e-module for delivering teaching cases on-line to public health professionals in field settings, and convening a cross-Harvard workshop to share best practices.

• “Making space” for interdisciplinary critical thinking

  Awardees will offer a series of interdisciplinary workshops that develop critical thinking through making.

• Virtual reality narratives in foreign language pedagogy

  Awardees will engage foreign language students in cultural and linguistic immersion through virtual reality (VR) film narratives.

• Project Nights and open-ended design research

  Awardees will measure the effects of open-ended extracurricular projects on student learning.

• Evaluating methods of teaching and assessing critical thinking: A mixed methods study of faculty and students across Harvard University

  Awardees will conduct a mixed methods study analyzing the teaching and learning of critical thinking skills at Harvard—the differences in approaches across Schools, and faculty and student perceptions of critical thinking instruction and assessment.

• Transforming team-learning teaching cases in public health for online platforms: an e-learning module development project

  Awardees transformed STRIPED teaching cases for online delivery, consistent with digital learning research and toward expanded outreach to working professionals.

• Bridging education research and practice using online learning modules

  Awardees will explore the best-performing sequences of instructional materials in both controlled studies and in the context of real online courses.

• LINK: Preparing students to evaluate evidence and navigate real world issues

  Awardees will refine six skill-building exercises intended to help students more effectively interpret evidence, and disseminate them to the Harvard teaching community.