Sheila Heen, Thaddeus R. Beal Professor of Practice and a Deputy Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School (HLS), specializes in navigating challenging negotiations where emotions, relationships, and legal components are on the line. Heen is responsible for and team-teaches in Harvard Law School’s three Negotiation Workshop courses, with enrollment of over 400 law students and cross-registrants annually. The workshops are a primary way that students meet the new HLS graduation requirement to take a course that teaches negotiation, relationship management, and leadership skills. Over the last 40 years, the Negotiation Workshop has developed a self-reflective and experiential pedagogy that challenges faculty to walk their own talk as they both teach and learn alongside students.  In the classroom, Heen and her faculty colleagues encourage students to reflect on their learning experiences, understand their decision-making processes, and apply theoretical knowledge in practical contexts to enhance their negotiation skills. 

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts, is an art historian who focuses on 18th- and 19th-century European and contemporary post-1970s art. Lajer-Burcharth uses physical objects – such as paintings, sculptures, and textile arts – to enable more immersive forms of learning that enable students to experience objects of study in a hands-on way that is not possible with text-heavy teaching methods. These objects serve as a primary teaching tool for encouraging new perspectives and interrogating original sources. Students examine various objects from museum and library collections under the expert guidance of curators, and eventually assist in the curation of an exhibit. This allows students to have hands-on experience in both understanding and creating, rather than be solely trapped by reading and speaking.  While her courses use physical objects as a point of reference, similar opportunities exist in other classroom contexts where students can contextualize the motivations of authors, musicians, and inventors, for example.

Shoba Ramanadhan, Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences (HSPH), creates curricular experiences that highlight community partnerships and incorporates diverse student experiences for shared knowledge building in the classroom and within the community. To do this, Ramanadhan integrates principles of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) into her teaching methodology—an approach that includes collaboration with community partners on research design and implementation. Bringing this style of research into the classroom models critical practices of partnership and setting shared goals in collaborative work. As part of this, students are encouraged to share their experiences, especially practice-based expertise from their public health backgrounds. This allows students to learn how they might work within communities based on the experience of peers and community members, rather than just the expertise of the instructor. This informs classroom discussions when approaching a public health research topic. This approach has been transformative for students: “When I started this work about 19 years ago, I had to learn about  what a community-based organization practitioner’s day actually looks like, how their organizational structure works, how poorly paid they are. And so, to me, the teaching is really understanding what you don't know and who you can ask, filling those gaps, so that you can be better equipped to be useful to the community you’re working with.”

Gavin Porter, Lecturer in Immunology (HMS), helps students develop critical skills for research paper analysis. Prior to 2019, his students would individually read papers and submit their analysis through a traditional templated question approach. Due to the repetitive nature of the assessment product and after realizing that all students could benefit from each other’s questions and ideas, Dr. Porter transitioned this assignment to a collaborative one using a social annotation platform created at Harvard called Perusall. The platform embeds the research paper PDF that students read asynchronously and mark with comments or questions throughout. Students see each other’s annotations and can build upon each other in collaborative threads and answer each other’s questions. Comments are situated directly within the margins of the course documents, instead of a disembodied discussion forum. Paper figures can be annotated, and so can video content.

The debate over assessments—their frequency, structure, and value—has become more vibrant in recent years, first with the onset of COVID-19 and now with the advent of Generative AI. As instructors experiment with different approaches, the Math Department has increased its emphasis on assessments, yielding some early successes. 

Brendan Kelly, Senior Preceptor and Director of Introductory Mathematics, notes that one of the main objectives in Harvard’s Math preparatory sequence is to provide students with a consistent, cumulative experience so that each course effectively builds off prior ones, or hands off to subsequent ones. However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a unique challenge. Kelly and his team observed that course-by-course experimentation with assessments during this period resulted in inconsistencies across courses, and as a result students being inadequately prepared for higher level Math courses - in turn prompting a reevaluation of their approach.

Sharad Goel, Professor of Public Policy (HKS), teaches statistical methods in his application-oriented course, Law, Order and Algorithms, and in the team-taught course, Quantitative Analysis and Empirical Methods. He emphasizes the importance of making course content relatable and relevant to students' lives and interests to enhance their understanding of quantitative analysis. In addition, he believes that this approach is the initial step towards fostering an inclusive learning environment. Last year, Goel joined the Faculty Learning Community on Disability and Learning at HKS, which allowed him to align his research and course content with his teaching method through a wide range of integrated practices. Straightforward examples include always ensuring to use microphones, repeating questions for clarity, describing visual content for students instead of assuming students can see it, and allowing a brief pause after asking questions to give students time to think.

Allison 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. 

Andrew 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?” 

Vijay Janapa Reddi, Associate Professor (SEAS) and director of the Edge Computing Lab, is an applied machine learning computer architect. As a scholar with deep knowledge of how artificial intelligence (AI) works, Janapa Reddi offers a unique perspective on both the challenges and opportunities generative AI presents. Generative AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, are changing how students interact with course material and setting new standards for the skills necessary for future professional fields. While Janapa Reddi is cautious about implementing exercises that leverage such platforms in his COMPSCI 141: Computing Hardware course, he suggests that faculty seize this moment to reevaluate their teaching objectives and consider how they can support students to develop the skills they will need to navigate and use these new technologies in their careers. Imagine a future where every engineer is supported by a personalized AI assistant, offering guidance throughout their processes, enabling them to design optimal, robust, secure, and highly efficient systems.

Rebecca Nesson, Dean for Academic Programs, SEAS, and Charles R. Nesson, William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and Principal Investigator of BKC’s Nymity project, have worked together for many years as a unique father-daughter teaching team at Harvard. Ranging from First-Year Seminars to offerings at the Law School and the Extension School, their courses focus on the deliberative practices of juries and their role in determining justice. Since 2006, the Nessons have embraced new technology in their classrooms to encourage student engagement and productive dialogue across differences as they and their students consider issues of jury bias and power in their courses. 

Rosalea Monacella, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), works to create opportunities for students to build collaborative skills and facilitate peer-to-peer learning by “embed[ding] the techniques of joint problem-solving and ideas development” in her design studio courses. Monacella starts by fostering a classroom community built on mutual respect and trust, modelling and scaffolding collaborative behaviours to help students develop their unique individual capacities through collaborative work. She has found that instructors often assume that students know how to work effectively in group settings; however, oftentimes, students have never been provided with scaffolded experiences that will help them develop their group working styles. 

I. Glenn Cohen, James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, Deputy Dean at Harvard Law, and Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics, teaches courses on health law and civil procedure. As Deputy Dean, Professor Cohen instituted a new pre-orientation program for law students, Zero-L. This asynchronous, module-based program aims to better prepare students to step on campus. First designed for Harvard students and launched in 2019, the course has now reached over 20,000 students at over 120 law schools around the country and a few from abroad. Some of the materials in the course are also available for general audiences for free through HarvardX as “Introduction to American Civics: Presented by Zero-L."

Stephanie Pierce, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Mansi Srivastava, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences co-developed a course for undergraduates with a goal of reaching a larger number of students and exploring similar sets of questions from different angles. They bring their expertise together in a novel course that truly represents the aims of integrative biology: How to Build an Animal. Pierce is a structural biologist and Srivastava is a developmental biologist. These two perspectives of animal biology are rarely taught in the same course, but they’ve found the lenses are complementary. The combination is intended to provide students with a robust foundation of knowledge or “springboard” that can help deepen their interest in integrative biology, as well as foster deeper engagement in upper level courses. Week to week, the course is structured as a modified flipped classroom. The first of two weekly class meetings features a lecture session directed by both professors that gives the foundation needed to participate actively in the second class meeting—a hands-on lab component centered on exposure to research techniques. The week culminates in a teaching fellow (TF)-led section focused on learning to read academic literature effectively. 

Shai Dromi, Associate Senior Lecturer on Sociology (FAS), teaches courses on philanthropy, activism, and collective identity. Dromi frequently incorporates active learning exercises and collaborations into his courses. In his undergraduate course, Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector, he partners with a wide variety of Harvard offices, including Widener Library, the Department of Athletics, and the Harvard College Fund, to showcase examples of the course content. He finds that “Harvard is full of… pockets of people who are really excited to have people come visit them” and that students benefit pedagogically from getting to know their campus community better. 

Dr. Rose Molina, Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology and Director of the Medical Language Program at Harvard Medical School (HMS), is a scholar-activist with a passion for applying language and immigration status as critical lenses for understanding and eliminating inequities in maternal health. While HMS has a long history of medical language trainings, many were dependent on student leadership rather than supported by the administrative infrastructure required for sustainability and growth. In 2018, HMS established a formal Medical Language Program as part of the Office of Scholarly Engagement with the goal of building a multilingual physician workforce to advance health equity. The program includes Intermediate and Advanced Medical Spanish, Intermediate Medical Mandarin, and Intermediate Medical Portuguese taught by HMS faculty. Pilot courses in Intermediate Medical French and Beginner Medical American Sign Language courses were held in Fall 2022. The Program also runs an Intensive Medical Spanish course in September and October each year for students who have completed their clerkships. Course offerings are tailored each year to the language needs of incoming students.  

Musa Syeed, Briggs Copeland Lecturer on English, teaches screenwriting in the Creative Writing Program. Students are introduced to documentary and hybrid filmmaking in his course, Get Real: The Art of Community-Based Film. While learning about the technical and ethical considerations of creating a short narrative film or documentary, they also are challenged to effectively engage with their community in an intentional, responsible way that addresses issues of authorship and social impact. The Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship helps with curriculum design and also funding support (for example, providing gift cards for community participants or funding a TA).

Tsedal Neeley, Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research, first experimented with simulations in the classroom as a doctoral student. She crafted vignettes and scenarios on paper aimed at developing empathy, cross-cultural awareness, and behavioral change and presented them to students. As she continued her research on fostering collaboration between distributed team members from different cultures and with different language abilities, Neeley sought to develop a virtual teaching tool that could simulate these dynamics for students and provide an opportunity to gain insight into the cognitive and emotional challenges that arise for members and managers of global teams. She developed an online Global Collaboration Simulation, The Tip of the Iceberg, in which students are randomly assigned roles of native or non-native English speakers at a fictional organization. In the fifteen-minute simulation, the program constrains students’ actions to mimic communication patterns of real teams and provide firsthand experience of how communication challenges can interfere with work goals. The simulation has been used in courses at Harvard Business School and by thousands of people worldwide since its launch. 

Luke 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.  

Flavia Peréa, Lecturer in Sociology (FAS) and Director of the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship, teaches Pursuing Truth and Justice: Principles and Methods of Equity Through Inquiry. This course aims to be “an example of what equity and inclusion can look like in the curriculum” both through the topics covered—for example, liberatory research methods, oppression, and structural injustice— and by supporting students “to be able to think about messy things, put out hard questions, and really wrangle with ‘what does it even mean for me as a student at Harvard to be doing this work’?”  

Aisha Yousafzai, Associate Professor of Global Health, launched the Early Childhood Development: Global Strategies for Implementation HarvardX course in 2021. This self-paced, asynchronous course is designed for practitioners of public health to learn about program and policy development and has enrolled over 31,000 students. Yousafzai has taught a range of course formats during her time at Harvard: residential, hybrid, online, and now an asynchronous HarvardX course. Each course type “requires its own thought process about the right pedagogy,” but Yousafzai believes that careful consideration of the various strategies available for each course and what works has enriched the learning environment across her courses. 

Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, teaches seminars on Buddhist and Tibetan intellectual history and literature at Harvard Divinity School and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Gyatso aims to “cultivate an experimental and convivial atmosphere in the classroom” that encourages students to draw connections between the past and present, interrogate a diverse set of primary sources, and create a community that allows students to feel comfortable taking intellectual risks and asking questions. This is particularly important in her field, which is often unfamiliar and engages with historical contexts that may seem distant from contemporary issues. Gyatso inspires her students to draw connections between the literature, philosophy, religion, and arts of the past and contemporary conversations on topics ranging from identity to gender to climate. By encouraging students to ask questions and find links between past and present, Gyatso is able to help them find an entryway into otherwise unfamiliar topics.

Kaighin McColl, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and of Environmental Science and Engineering, is a hydrologist who extended his General Education course, Water and the Environment, beyond the science to include artistic representations of the impact that water has had on human life across time. After connecting with the Harvard Art Museums (HAM) at the Bok Center’s August 2019 Course Design Institute, McColl began collaborating with curators in 2020 to broaden the course, make it more engaging to a general audience, and challenge students to view the concepts learned in class in a different domain. He notes that he’s “a complete rookie when it comes to art,” but that HAM curators have been “very enthusiastic and helpful” figuring out ways to integrate the Museums’ collections into his course.

Matt Andrews, Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development at Harvard Kennedy School, is the faculty director of the Building State Capability program in the Center for International Development at Harvard and trains students in Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) for solving complex policy and management problems alongside his co-instructor, Salimah Samji. PDIA is a step-by-step approach – developed over years of applied action research - that helps students break down a problem into its root causes, identify entry points, search for possible solutions, take action, reflect upon what has been learned, adapt, and then act again. It is “a dynamic process with tight feedback loops that allows students to build their own solution to a problem.”  This approach is most effective, Andrews believes, when “learning happens in groups.” 

Candace Bertotti, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, teaches The Arts of Communication, a class focusing on public speaking. To help students overcome their fear of speaking in front of others, Candace incorporates virtual reality (VR) into her classroom. Students put on VR goggles and are instantly transported to the front of a large virtual crowd awaiting their speech. Students experience a range of audiences and audience reactions. It's realistic—and feels safe.... Read more about Tapping the power of virtual reality to enhance public speaking

Salil Vadhan, Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics & Lead PI on Harvard’s Privacy Tools Project, teaches COMPSCI 120: Introduction to Algorithms and their Limitations, a new introductory course in theoretical computer science “aimed at giving students the power of using mathematical abstraction and rigorous proof to understand computation with confidence.” Many computer science students are “builders” who enjoy the creative aspect of the field, yet their mathematical backgrounds are often quite diverse; to some, mathematical theory is unfamiliar. In redesigning the undergraduate computer science curriculum, it was a priority to make this “new language, reasoning, and way of thinking” accessible to students early in the program.... Read more about Leveraging asymmetry in student's prior knowledge through peer learning exercises

Martin Bechthold, the Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology at the Harvard School of Design, and Mary Tolikas, Chief Innovation Officer at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Visiting Lecturer on Engineering Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, work together to teach Independent Engineering Design Project I & II, a small, seminar-size course for second-year students in the Master in Design Engineering program. Students spend the academic year designing prototype solutions to real-world problems about which they are passionate. Throughout the two semesters, students work towards understanding the complexity and dynamics underlying the problem and, by collaborating with relevant stakeholders, they explore visionary solutions and iterate on prototypes that would best address their challenge. Analyzing and quantifying potential impact is central to solution development. Early in the course, students are placed in self-selected “affinity groups,” based on shared interests. Students use these groups throughout the term to bounce ideas from and relay feedback. They also receive regular feedback from faculty advisors throughout each stage as they continue to evolve their project.

Taiwo Ehineni, Preceptor of African Languages, emphasizes the importance of “cultural frames” in language learning, or the ecologies in which the language is developed and used. “When students come to take my language class, it is an opportunity to introduce them to Nigeria.” One way this is accomplished is by using songs and music, which express culturally resonant ideas through creative uses of language. Ehineni teaches Yoruba as well as West African Pidgin. Class begins with students singing a song in Yoruba together while Ehineni plays the drums. Then they generate a vocabulary list based on the song they sang together, examine the grammatical use of the word in the lyrics, and look up the meaning.... Read more about Developing cultural and linguistic competencies through music

David Atherton, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, taught Creativity, a general education course which explores the nature of creativity and the role it plays in our lives, remotely in spring 2021. The course was originally designed before the COVID-19 pandemic and was proposed in response to undergraduate students’ desire for more creative expression, spaces for reflection, and connections to their personal lives in the classroom. “Once the pandemic hit, the goals felt more critical than ever.” Atherton and a team of teaching fellows collaborated with the Bok Center to design the course, grounding it around four core questions. Every week, students were given a creative assignment coupled with an analytic reflection about how their creation connected to the course readings. The course’s capstone project invited students to apply the course themes and create something that would impact someone in their lives, beyond the context of the course. Students included a final reflective essay that explained their project goals.

Linda Kaboolian, Instructor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, teaches Negotiations for public health students who will continue to practice these skills in everyday and high-stakes settings all around the world. “I’m a social scientist,” she explains, “so I’m very concerned about how to modify practice as a negotiator to be relevant to the context you’re working with.” Kaboolian underscores the importance of understanding the power dynamics and cultural context at play before negotiating. She designs stylized cases steeped in research on culture and scaffolded in complexity, building from one-on-one discussions to multi-stakeholder, multi-issue dilemmas.

... Read more about Practicing complex, new skills in a supportive environment