HGSE

The Importance of Gathering and Incorporating Mid-Semester Student Feedback


image of Allison PingreeAllison Pingree, Associate Director of Instructional Support and Development for the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Teaching and Learning Lab, partners with faculty to enhance teaching and learning across contexts. With over 25 years of experience as a faculty and educational developer, she works with individual instructors and teaching teams to build effective and inclusive learning communities, consults on course design, and leads professional learning programs on a multitude of topics and themes. Pingree is guided by her commitment to “deep listening, skilled facilitation, and reflective practice” as she coaches faculty and develops new programming to foster pedagogical innovation and best practices. At this stage in the semester, she urges faculty to consider gathering student feedback on their courses and implementing changes to respond to student concerns. 

Assessment as a learning tool


image of Andrew HoAndrew Ho, Charles William Eliot Professor of Education, is a psychometrician whose research focuses on the design and use of test scores in educational policy. Given his scholarly interest in assessment, Ho feels the pressure to “practice what I preach” in his teaching to ensure that assessments offer opportunities for student learning. In his statistics courses, Ho aims for assessments to be “genuine, relevant, and engaging acts of learning” that simulate the work educational statisticians do. He argues that it is crucial for faculty to have clarity of purpose when measuring student learning, and suggests all faculty consider the question: “Why are you assessing?” 

Adapting residential courses for online cohorts


image of James Honan

James Honan, Senior Lecturer on Education at HGSE, has taught courses on nonprofit management and finance at Harvard since 1991 and additionally has 15 years of online teaching experience at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). When COVID-19 forced all teaching and learning at Harvard to move online, Honan and his teaching team were uniquely positioned to adapt his in-person courses for a new modality. With a robustly developed teaching toolkit across residential and online instructional formats, Honan currently teaches two versions of his Strategic Finance for Non-Profit Leaders course—one to residential students and one to the first cohort of HGSE’s fully online Ed.M. program, the Online Master's in Education Leadership. Honan and his longtime teaching team offer the online versions of the courses in one of HGSE’s state-of-the art studio classrooms, which features multiple large video screens, voice-activated cameras, and other technology enhancements to support effective online pedagogy.
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Structuring and grading participation


image of Luke MiratrixLuke Miratrix, Associate Professor and Co-Faculty Director of the PhD in Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaches graduate level statistics and data science courses, including Introduction to Statistical Computing and Data Science in Education and Multilevel and Longitudinal Models. In these courses, Miratrix tasks students with creating individualized participation plans. Early in the semester, each student submits a short essay about their goals for how they intend to engage with the course. Halfway through the term, students write a brief reflection evaluating progress on their goals and making adjustments as desired. At the end of the semester, students complete a one- or two-paragraph self-assessment and assign themselves a participation grade. This grade is reviewed by the teaching team, potentially adjusted, and constitutes the bulk of the full participation grade for the course.  

Identity, vulnerability, and courage in classroom discussion


Christina VillarrealChristina “V” Villarreal, Lecturer on Education and Faculty Director of the Teacher Education Program, empowers, uplifts, and nurtures communities of students every year through her popular course Ethnic Studies and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). With pedagogical approaches grounded in ethnic studies, she works with students to co-create a classroom community where vulnerability, courage, and honesty are encouraged and valued. Through discussion facilitation, Villarreal creates space for students to bring their lived experiences to topics and shares her personal and political views together with them. She also utilizes small break-out groups for in-depth sharing and a physical circle for large-group discussion to facilitate more democratic engagement.

Team-based learning in a foundational course


Carrie Conaway, Senior LecturerJames Kim, Professor of EducationCarrie Conaway, Senior Lecturer, and James Kim, Professor of Education, teach the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s new foundational course, Evidence. The course trains students to understand and apply a variety of evidence to a real-life problem of practice. In order to learn about different types of evidence and how to apply it to solve real-world problems, students work in small teams using team-based learning (TBL). Conaway and Kim use survey data to construct teams that are diverse in terms of background, program, and comfort with different types of evidence. Each group activity is centered around a different component of a case developed from Kim’s research. The activities culminate in final recommendations for how to improve literacy outcomes for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina. 

Learning from and giving back to the community through the classroom


Deborah Jewell-ShermanDeborah Jewell-Sherman, Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Practice in Educational Leadership, helps students develop leadership skills and a deeper understanding of the work involved in being a systems-level leader. In her two-term course, The Workplace Lab for System-Level Leaders (WPL), students actively collaborate with school districts across the nation, including the local Cambridge, Lincoln and Boston public schools. Jewell-Sherman intentionally scaffolds the course from personal introspection to undertaking significant problems of practice for sitting superintendents and CEO’s of educational entities. Before students are assigned to teams that maximize diversity in leadership and communication styles, they deeply reflect to identify their core values. “In terms of practice,” she notes, “it’s important to know who you are and for what you stand.” Groups collaborate on simulations and analyze case studies based on real-world problems while leveraging recent research. Later, students work directly with community partners and present recommendations in a “New Haven” run before hosting an on-campus final “Broadway” run to a full audience. In January, Jewell-Sherman typically takes students on a four-day trip to a school district or educational entity in another state to collaborate on new projects.

Incorporating social support and love into the classroom


Gretchen Brion-MeiselsGretchen Brion-Meisels, Lecturer on Education, focuses on ensuring that holistic support is apparent and felt deeply in her classroom. From listing mental health resources on all her syllabi to convening opening circles to build relationships at the start of class, Brion-Meisels incorporates ways of “checking in.” In her course Establishing Loving Spaces for Learning, students are asked to keep reflective journals and share them with a peer to engage in a conversation around their experiences. “Fundamentally, my biggest goal is to normalize the idea that everyone needs support. We’re all works-in-progress, learning and growing, but also with a lot to contribute to each other’s growth.”

Engaging real-world stakeholders to provide feedback to students


Jal Mehta, HGSEJal David Mehta, Associate Professor of Education, directs students to use design thinking and interact with real-world stakeholders when making proposals to improve educational systems in his course Deeper Learning for All: Designing a 21st-Century School System. At the end of the semester, students present final projects to panels of educational experts ranging from superintendents to K-12 teachers to Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty. 

Lending structure to collaborative work


Kathy Boudett, Into PracticeKathryn Parker Boudett, Lecturer on Education, carefully structures the way students learn to collaborate with one another in her course, Data Wise: Using Data to Improve Teaching and Learning. For example, she models collaborative learning through an open discussion of student feedback, or “pluses and deltas,” collected in the previous session with the whole class. She also makes sure students receive plenty of experience putting into practice the ideas from one of the core texts for the course, Meeting Wise: Making the Most of Collaborative Time for Educators. She does this by teaching them to use “rolling agendas” (which can be used by student groups working in any discipline) via Google Docs. The template makes it easy for students to remember to collaboratively set objectives, delegate tasks, and document the ongoing work of their teams. Boudett, or one of her teaching fellows, can then access the shared document to provide formative feedback in real time.

Teacher/learner dependency: A classroom culture of reciprocity


Kay MersethKatherine K.  Merseth, Senior Lecturer on Education, creates a culture of reciprocity in her classroom where students and instructors are expected to both teach and learn. “The two words are often interchanged because they are inextricably linked – learners need teachers, and teachers need learners.” She establishes this in part by requiring attendance and learning students’ names.

Communicating course culture: Beyond the syllabus


Karen BrennanKaren Brennan, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, designs her syllabus for T550: Designing for Learning by Creating to not only communicate the plan for the course, but to introduce students to the course culture.