Dr. Sang E. Park, Associate Professor of Restorative Dentistry and Biomaterials Sciences and Associate Dean for Dental Education, is committed to ensuring that dental education at Harvard School of Dental Medicine (HSDM) prepares students for careers as dental practitioners while meeting the needs of its patients. Dr. Park has been instrumental in several curriculum redesigns, including the introduction of the Case Completion clinical curriculum in 2009. The most recent efforts of the Curriculum Redesign Task Force for the class for 2027 included a restructuring of the preclinical and biomedical curriculum, a strengthening of research components, and engagement of the Scholars in Dental Education program to ensure the curriculum reflects the needs of students and the values of the institution. 

In the Spring of 2023, a new curriculum redesign effort considered HSDM students’ recommendations. A day-long Curriculum Hackathon captured the voices of predoctoral students from across various class years. Students were assigned to four groups and asked to create their ideal curriculum which they presented to faculty judges at the end of the Hackathon. The students were expected to align their program design with the school’s mission and goals and to take certain barriers to change into consideration (for example accreditation requirements).... Read more about Incorporating student voices into curriculum redesign efforts

Dr. Carmen Messerlian, Assistant Professor of Environmental Reproductive, Perinatal, and Pediatric Epidemiology, remodeled the department’s gateway Reproductive and Perinatal Epidemiology I course after her first year teaching it. Drawing on key observations and 6-8 hours of one-on-one student meetings per week, “I wanted to understand students’ learning needs and requirements, their goals for the course, and where their training was going to take them.” From there, she synthesized both her own experience in the field and quantitative student review data to radically revise the course’s structure. Now the course helps students develop their scientific research skills, explicitly scaffolding how to perform activities that students rarely get formal training in, like academic journal peer reviews, abstract writing, and poster presentations. At its core, the course trains students “how to become a reproductive epidemiologist,” and to learn how to put on “an epidemiological lens” when they produce, digest, or evaluate material in the field. 

Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law, adapted his digital governance course to incorporate what everyone was really focused on in mid-spring of 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of “compartmentalizing” between class and crisis, he reworked the syllabus to respond to students’ needs and evolving experiences. Zittrain replaced the final exam with collaborative reports in which students examined aspects of the pandemic through the lens of digital governance dilemmas. “The idea was to offer students an opportunity to apply what they learned in the course to problems that were on everybody’s mind.”... Read more about Grappling with a global pandemic in class, as a class

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.