Start your Winter Teaching Week morning before your first session by coming to have coffee with Bok Center staff. Ask your teaching questions and learn more about our resources!
Getting to know your students enhances your ability to create a successful learning environment, so what can you do to establish a relationship with your students, encourage them to ask questions, and create a positive atmosphere? Rapport, a harmonious relationship with others, is influenced by both culture and language, and this workshop is an opportunity for international TFs to discuss the challenges you anticipate when building rapport and to explore strategies to build rapport both with and amongst your students. Practice introducing yourself and using active listening techniques to...
As an experienced TF, how do you reflect on your teaching experience, and prepare job market materials that tell the story of the teacher you are and the teacher you want to become? Specifically, how can a syllabus function in this way? Most tenure-track job postings request a sample syllabus. How do you go about creating one? This workshop introduces a method of curriculum planning called backwards design. The idea is simple: you can’t start planning how you’re going to teach until you know what you want your students to learn. Together we’ll brainstorm learning goals for our...
This session addresses principles of professional conduct and classroom management for teachers as it relates to Title IX requirements and Harvard’s commitment to gender equity. We’ll discuss how one balances Harvard University’s commitment to the free exchange of ideas while maintaining a safe and healthy educational and work environment in which no member of the community is excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination in any University program or activity on the basis of their sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Participants...
General Education courses connect what students learn in the classroom to the lives they lead outside of college. How will you help your students make this connection? Come to this session and learn about the goals of Gen Ed and its place in the curriculum, and find out about the challenges and opportunities teaching in this program presents. Please bring a copy of your course description that you can share with someone else electronically or in hard copy.
How should you introduce yourself on the first day of class? How should you have students introduce themselves? How do you begin to build an inclusive environment? In this lunchtime discussion, we will consider a variety of case studies focused on how to help students introduce themselves in class in a way that promotes comfort and confidence, and respects individual differences, especially around identity, equity, and gender, that can emerge through icebreakers and introductions. During this session, we will analyze the dynamics at play in these activities and brainstorm best...
In this workshop, designed for graduate students in STEM, we will develop and practice skills to meaningfully and clearly convey your research to different audiences, consider how to incorporate narrative techniques to motivate audiences to care about your research, and think about how we can use verbal and visual explanations to their best effect in all the forms of communicating science. In so doing, we will discuss the purpose of jargon and when it is most useful, some of the different purposes of “science communication,” and how to tailor our communication to convey...
As teachers in the humanities and/or the social sciences, you’ve probably encountered students who have a hard time translating their reading into fruitful discussion and insightful analysis, whether in class or in their papers. Learning how to traverse the arc from reading a text, to saying something intelligent about it, to receiving and responding to an instructor’s feedback about that writing, ultimately takes years, and may happen to different students at different moments. What, then, can you achieve in just one semester? In this session, designed for both new and...
Start your morning before your first session by coming to have coffee with Bok Center staff. Ask your teaching questions and learn more about our resources!
This Coffee Break is a part of Winter Teaching Week- a series of intensive workshops offered during J-Term in conjunction with January@GSASfor graduate student teachers at every stage, from just starting out to looking toward the job market.
Problem solving is a central activity in science, engineering, and math classes. In this workshop, designed for both new and experienced TFs in the STEM disciplines, we will explore strategies for teaching with problems. How and why might you encourage students to work in groups to solve problems? How can you enable a variety of students to participate and share their answers and ideas with the class? This workshop will provide you with practical methods for creating an inclusive classroom environment for all students to learn to solve problems and tackle scientific and...
What makes for an effective discussion in your discipline? How do you balance your goals for the session with student questions and interests? How do you navigate challenges, such as a conflict or tangent you’re not sure will pay off? Join us for a discussion of these and other questions about how to make discussion more meaningful and engaging. We’ll play (literally!) with the various moves people make in discussing, while asking ourselves how we can introduce students to the idea that discussion, like writing, is a learned skill. We’ll offer strategies for encouraging...
Join the Bok Center for lunch to continue to talk about topics that came up in the morning session, and learn more about resources available to teaching fellows across the FAS.
Join the Harvard University Digital Scholarship Support Group (http://dssg.fas.harvard.edu) for the Digital Teaching Methods workshop, a foundational seminar that focuses on the thoughtful integration of digital tools and methods in teaching and learning. This workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to several approaches that have been used successfully at Harvard, all grounded in specific pedagogical examples and use cases, including online exhibitions, annotations, timelines, data visualization, and multimedia. Whether you will be teaching with digital tools for the first...
What can new TFs do to get ready for the first day of class and beyond? Come to this introduction to the fundamentals of teaching to practically prepare to teach for the first time, to learn about resources available to you as you begin your teaching career, and to build confidence in the process! We follow the arc of the semester in this workshop, starting with the first day of class and moving through lesson planning, delivery, and giving and receiving feedback. Please bring a syllabus to use (your own or one for a class you might teach).This session is designed for TFs...
Winter Teaching Week is a series of intensive workshops offered during J-Term in conjunction with January@GSAS for graduate student teachers at every stage, from just starting out to looking toward the job market. These workshops feature specialists from the Bok Center and other units at Harvard and span a variety of subject areas, including: teaching fundamentals, public speaking, professional development, and more! Pre-registration is mandatory.
