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.

• Engaging with course material and serving communities at the same time

  Linda Bilmes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, created the Harvard Kennedy School’s first-ever field lab, which combines in-class learning with real-world project work in local and state governments. Since its inception in 2005, the course has involved hundreds of students from across Harvard graduate schools. It is an advanced course focused on public finance, operations and budgeting. Each year, Bilmes and her teaching team receive dozens of applications from mayors and city managers. She and her team select a small number of intellectually challenging projects with buy-in at the highest level. The selected partners describe their projects to students at the start of the term; projects range from addressing homelessness to municipal debt. Then students go on site visits to “get a sense of the crunchiness” of each task and to rank clients by interest before they are sorted into collaborative teams. At the end of the semester, students present recommendations to clients.

• 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.

• 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.

• Humaine

  Humaine is an online conversational AI platform that provides virtual patients for the deliberate practice of medical students and trainees.

• 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.

• tPock – Digital High School Education in Bangladesh

  Tpock's goal is to digitalize high school education in Bangladesh to improve the quality of education in the country.

• Mopi

  Mopi fills this gap by empowering women entrepreneurs with pedagogical and managerial training and resources to run their own childcare centers.

• Hustl

  Hustl Awardees: Mohini Bishnoi (HKS) and Sachin Paranjape (External) Summary coming soon 

• 1Room

  We plan to partner with local educators to build projects that help drive learning outcomes and engage students in learning.

• GenUnity

  GenUnity is a civic leadership experience that empowers individuals to affect real, systemic change in their community.