The HILT website compiles teaching and learning resources across the University. Search for Resources allows you to browse those resources pertaining to a specific role or enter a search term in the search bar. In this context, “teaching and learning resource” includes a broad range of offerings—from profiles featuring effective practices to grant-funded projects to larger initiatives and organizations.
| Title | Institutional Home ? | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Capturing conversation to build ideas collectively | CROSS | Ryan Buell, Finnegan Family Associate Professor of Business Administration, leveraged Scribble for his remote course to help students engage with case discussion longitudinally and collectively. The virtual board platform allowed students to engage online in lieu of an in-person experience in which the blackboard operates as a coordinating element for case discussion. “It helps students put the pieces together, allowing them to track any idea shared by the faculty and shared by the students.” |
| How to talk about far-right extremism and disinformation in the classroom | It’s always difficult to talk about pressing social issues in the classroom, especially as political polarization, disinformation, and extremism take over public conversations. Students often rely on social media, particularly YouTube and Tik Tok, to form their opinions on these topics, which is why educators should be aware of the range of discussions happening on these contentious topics. Even knowing how to talk about social functions of conspiracies or media practices, like news gathering and sourcing, can help diffuse difficult classroom situations. At this event, Joan Donovan will speak about her experiences teaching media manipulation, white supremacist extremism, and disinformation and provide some tips for addressing it. This event is a follow-on to HILT’s ninth annual conference, “Championing Equitable Instruction and Inclusive Classrooms.” | |
| The importance of incorporating mentorship into your teaching practice | CROSS | Dr. Anita Vanka, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Associate Advisor & Director of Hinton Society at Harvard Medical School, co-directs Practice of Medicine with Dr. Katherine Johnston, Assistant Professor of Medicine. The eleven-month course involves several hundred faculty members at different teaching hospitals and is designed to teach first-year medical and dental students how to effectively interview and communicate with patients, perform a thorough physical exam, reason through diagnostic possibilities, and translate findings effectively in both oral and written form. Given the size and breadth of the course, Drs. Vanka and Johnston developed a mentoring system which allows for each student to meet with an assigned faculty advisor at their hospital site several times a year. These meetings encourage faculty to develop personal relationships with the students, oversee their clinical progress, provide feedback, and guide students into setting goals for their learning and progress. |
| Encouraging learning by creating alongside diverse feedback | CROSS | 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.” |
| Virtual Harvard: Using 3D imaging to support learning space planning | CROSS H | While many of our campus spaces have been empty, the Virtual Harvard team has been hard at work, capturing high-resolution 3D scans of building interiors. Rus Gant from the Harvard Visualization Lab will show us some examples of what the team is capturing and how they’re doing it, and Cara Noferi from the FAS Office of Physical Resources and Planning will share how the scans are beginning to be used to support planning and projects in FAS learning spaces. |
| Module 0, Preparing students for online learning success | CROSS H | What is Module 0? It depends on who you ask. When it comes to helping our students get started with a course, every school has a different way to do that. Some programs focus on helping students access and use technology by providing policy and procedure guidelines, technical training and support. Other programs want to make sure the students have the appropriate incoming knowledge to succeed in the course they are about to begin. Join us to learn about what “Module 0” means at Harvard. |
| Enhancing learning through an alternative (and immersive) classroom | CROSS | Nicole Mills, Senior Preceptor in Romance Languages and Literatures, helps students grasp the French language and experience the culture through “alternative classroom contexts.” Specifically, students participate in virtual reality (VR) experiences alongside the curriculum. During the first week of the semester, students immerse themselves in the daily lives of four different Parisians from the same quarter through a series of 360 VR videos that were self-recorded by the Parisians themselves. They then partner to challenge stereotypes of Parisian culture and compare observations and findings. For remote learning, Mills added both amateur and professional VR films showcasing Parisian life with accompanying tasks. These VR experiences are mediated by one-on-one 30-minute discussions with Parisians designed to both develop interactional competence and encourage the discovery of cultural phenomena. VR can transport students to culturally immersive experiences that are otherwise impossible given COVID-19 travel restrictions. |
| Empowering students to develop research skills | CROSS | Terence D. Capellini, Richard B Wolf Associate Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, empowers students to grow as researchers in his Building the Human Body course through a comprehensive, course-long collaborative project that works to understand the changes in the genome that make the human skeleton unique. For instance, of the many types of projects, some focus on the genetic basis of why human beings walk on two legs. This integrative “Evo-Devo” project demands high levels of understanding of biology and genetics that students gain in the first half of class, which is then applied hands-on in the second half of class. Students work in teams of 2-3 to collect their own morphology data by measuring skeletons at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and leverage statistics to understand patterns in their data. They then collect and analyze DNA sequences from humans and other animals to identify the DNA changes that may encode morphology. Throughout this course, students go from sometimes having “limited experience in genetics and/or morphology” to conducting their own independent research. This project culminates in a team presentation and a final research paper. |
| Human Bridges in the Study of Race, Religion, Art, and Politics | CROSS H | This talk will explore teaching about difference in a Harvard Divinity School course that looks at connections between the Harlem Renaissance and Mexican Modernism during the 1920s and 1930s. Using holiday-themed examples and compelling visual images, we will juxtapose the lives and works of two important figures in the course: Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican-born caricaturist who spent most of his life in New York City illustrating for Harlem Renaissance texts and popular magazines, and Elizabeth Catlett, a U.S.-born Black sculptor and printmaker who spent her life in Mexico where she created some of the most powerful symbols and images of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Covarrubias and Catlett captured our students' imaginations in part because they serve as "human bridges" connecting the United States with Mexico as well the past with the present. Please join for a lively and wide-ranging meditation on the dynamic interplay of race, religion, art, and politics, and the cross-fertilization between history and ethics. |
| Next Gen Success = Harvard Success: Inclusive Practices for Supporting First-Gen, Lower-Income Students In and Beyond the Classroom | CROSS H | Join members of the Harvard Next Gen Initiative to learn more about their Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund pilot program that consolidates, aligns, and enhances Harvard’s institutional supports for Next Gen student populations (predominantly first-gen, low-income students) in and beyond the classroom. This session presents an overview of the Next Gen student population, pedagogical tools that promote Next Gen Student Success, and how each one of us plays a role in strengthening Harvard’s commitment to inclusive excellence. |