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. 

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

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.