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.

• Student case pedagogy: Learning from their own experience

  Ronald Heifetz, Co-Founder of the Center for Public Leadership and King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer of Public Leadership, uses experiential teaching methods like student case analysis—where students collaboratively develop and analyze cases drawn from their own work experiences—to promote deeper engagement and stronger retention of leadership concepts.

• Blended Learning: Using interactive online modules before class to enhance learning in class

  Dan Levy, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Faculty Chair of the Strengthening Learning and Teaching Excellence (SLATE) Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, developed a series of online modules for Advanced Quantitative Methods I, work made possible by teaching fellow Teddy Svoronos and SLATE staff member Mae Klinger.

• Defining learning objectives: Pre-semester, all semester

  José A. (Tony) Gómez-Ibáñez, Derek C. Bok Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, who holds appointments at the GSD and HKS, defines the learning objectives of his course prior to the start of the semester and references them to frame each individual class session: “I use the first five minutes to place each class in the course – ‘The last class we talked about X and today we want to see how those ideas might apply to Y.’”

• Learning from learning management systems: New ways to engage students through Canvas

  Arthur Applbaum, Adams Professor of Democratic Values, Quinton Mayne, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, and Christopher Robichaud, Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy piloted the new University-wide learning management system, Canvas, in their spring 2015 courses at the Harvard Kennedy School.

• Teachly: A research project

  Teachly was developed at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) to help faculty members teach more inclusively and effectively. The tool enables faculty to get to know their students and interact with them in a meaningful way through the robust data infrastructure.

• The Video Essay as a Learning Tool in Field Based Courses and Design Courses

  Awardees will explore the video essay as an integrative teaching tool in field-based and design-oriented courses.

• Choice architecture: When students become designers of optimal decision processes

  Awardee will develop in-class and online activities to improve student decision-making and increase classroom engagement.

• DIY flipping kit: Blended learning in the context of Canvas

  Awardees created a “do it yourself” flipping kit to help faculty across the University develop blended learning materials using Canvas.

• Leveraging teaching assistant potential and scaling-up high-intensity experiential learning

  Awardees will conduct and analyze the data of faculty interviews to surface best practices in teaching team management, with particular attention to the role of teaching assistants in the development of high-intensity experiential learning environments.

• From text to multimedia: Evaluating a scalable enhancement model for problem-based learning

  Awardees will conduct a comparison study to identify the impact of multimedia enhancements of case materials on student preparation and engagement.