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.

• Encouraging learning by creating alongside diverse feedback

  Paul B. Bottino, Co-Founder, Executive Director, and Lecturer at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, offers Start-up R&D to undergraduate students across disciplines who are interested in the field and have a particular project idea in mind. Within the workshop course structure, “each student project is the educational centerpiece.” Student groups work on a variety of innovative startup projects seeking solutions to problems they care about. The course uses multiple approaches to help students build upon their ideas and receive constructive feedback: “challenge sessions” where students outline their biggest obstacles to a small group of peers; individual meetings with Bottino and teaching fellows; and connections with alumni. “It’s like a Greek forum of peers, near-peers, and mentors” with students learning that “entrepreneurship is a creative and iterative research practice of idea formulation, experimentation, and feedback.” At the end of term, students present and receive feedback on projects at a public event “Demo Day.”

• Syllabus Explorer

  Harvard Syllabus Explorer is a web application developed by the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning - Research Group. Syllabus Explorer combines registrarial data and syllabi from Canvas to give users the ability to search for and download syllabi across Harvard.

• Flipping the classroom for deeper student engagement and feedback on learning

  L Mahadevan, Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics in SEAS, and Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics in FAS used a 2017-2018 SEAS Learning Incubator LInc Faculty Fellowship to emphasize active learning in his Mathematical Modeling course. He implemented a flipped classroom approach to enable students to come to class with problems and questions to collaborate on, time to develop their own problems from scratch, and work on modeling with peers. The foundational arc supporting this process has students move from observations through abstraction, analysis and communication, and iteration.

• 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.

• Meet

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

• Simple examples lead to deep engagement

  Three years ago, Scot T. Martin decided to “start from scratch” with his approach to teaching thermodynamics. He found that by focusing on every day, concrete examples (e.g., running, the function of the heart) he could help students rediscover and truly understand the fundamental laws.

• Real problems: Teaching theory through practice

  Jelani Nelson, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, assigns students real programming problems in his introductory algorithm courses, CS124Data Structures and Algorithms and CS125 Algorithms & Complexity.

• The hiccups, humility, and benefits of deciding to flip a course

  Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science, flipped part of her course, CS161, “Operating Systems."

• Project Nights and open-ended design research

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

• Teaching rewriting

  Awardees explored the potential impact of a writing instruction method that emphasizes the editorial and revision process, which has the potential advantages of scalability and skill transferability.

• Capture50: A tool to facilitate peer review and assessment

  Awardees will provide a low-cost tool that automatically captures video of instructors, facilitating more robust peer review and frequent opportunity for pedagogical assessment.

• Transforming education through computer vision analysis and automated assessment

  Awardees plan to develop tools for automatically analyzing student behavior, promoting richer interactions between students and teachers, and optimizing peer instruction in large lecture classes.

• WSI/ELP water policy learning project

  Awardees plan to involve students in a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project on water policy in an effort to use experiential and team-based learning to teach students vital professional skills.

• Expanding existing innovative program for assessing student learning in hands-on innovation courses

  Expanding existing innovative program for assessing student learning in hands-on innovation courses. Awardee plans to advance methods for better assessing how teams interact and ideas develop during experiential learning in multi-disciplinary engineering classes focused on design and innovation.

• Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH)

  "TECH's mission is to advance the understanding and practice of innovation and entrepreneurship through experiential education: by initiating, advancing and informing student projects. TECH helps faculty create and deliver innovation and entrepreneurship project courses, provides students with project support and sponsors and advises student groups working to build the Harvard innovation community. TECH, part of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (HSEAS), creates an innovation community for both undergraduate and graduate students across the university."

• SEAS Career Development Office

  Provides career advice and connects SEAS students to in-term, summer, and post-graduating opportunities.

• SEAS Office of Computing

  Provides information technology support and academic assistance to faculty, students, and staff.

• SEAS “Active Learning Lab”

  The SEAS academic plan emphasizes the need for hands-on engineering experiences and student design projects. The Active Learning Laboratories are expected to take the lead and excel in supporting these student experiences.

• SEAS Learning Incubator

  Provides fellowships and organizes events on evidence-based innovations in engineering / science teaching.