During this 3-day synchronous training, graduate student teachers will have the chance to explore, discuss, and practice the fundamentals of teaching remotely in more depth, and share ideas and strategies in a cohort of peers.

*Note: this is the first of 3 training sessions for this cohort.*

This session is part of Winter Teaching Week, which is designed to prepare new and experienced graduate student teachers for their roles as Teaching Fellows in the FAS. Sessions are capped and pre-registration is required....

Led by Adam Beaver

As a graduate student, poised at a relatively early stage of your academic career, you are accustomed to being on the receiving end of mentoring. You’ve probably developed a sense of the kinds of advice, interactions, and power dynamics that are helpful (as well as those that aren’t). Soon, if not already, the tables may turn, and you will be called upon to mentor others—whether a senior thesis advisee at Harvard, a group of undergraduates or graduate students in your first academic job, or the staff of a lab at a university or in private industry. How can...

Led by Eleanor Finnegan

If you were offered the opportunity to design a course from scratch, what principles would you use to guide your course design? In this seminar, we will read and discuss contemporary research on teaching and learning to identify what goals we should consider “central” to our course and how students are most likely to achieve them. We will also work together to identify principles of instructional design that allow our own teaching goals to become effective learning goals for our students. Over the course of the seminar, you will develop a novel syllabus...

Led by Sarah Emory

As a non-native English speaking teacher or scholar, what are strategies you can apply to improve your intelligibility when speaking English? What are features of English pronunciation you can use to make it easy for others to follow you? This hands-on, interactive seminar is designed to help you assess your own pronunciation and provide focused practice on common issues that affect intelligibility. Each class, we will complete exercises and activities that highlight different pronunciation features such as intonation, word and sentence stress, pausing,...

Led by Pamela Pollock and Bok Staff

What makes communication engaging? How do you tell your story as both a teacher and a scholar in your field? As graduate students and scholars, we need to be able to represent ourselves and our ideas in various modes and media, for a variety of audiences, and now we have to do it all remotely! This seminar is designed to help you practice the basics of crafting and delivering a talk, develop skills to make your communication compelling for different audiences, both orally, visually and online, and practice handling questions and other...

Led by Rebecca Miller Brown and Jen Thum, Assistant Director of Academic Engagement and Assistant Research Curator, Harvard Art Museums

Images and objects are valuable tools for teachers: they illustrate arguments, give tangible expression to ideas, and provide a means to engage with concepts in new and novel ways. But how can they be integrated most effectively in online classes? How can we teach students to “read” them carefully and critically? In this seminar we will explore and practice strategies for encouraging analytical reasoning, critical thinking, and...

Led by Lauren Davidson and the Learning Lab Team

Games! In this time of remote teaching, it’s not surprising that games have much to offer us as teachers working to motivate and challenge students online. After all, game designers have been thinking about a version of this design challenge for a long time. Most of us, however, haven’t taken the time to analyze the tools game designers use to motivate players-- mechanics such as adaptive challenge level; continuous, often low-stakes, feedback; timers and races; opportunities for strategizing and risk-taking, to name a few....

Led by Bok Pedagogy Fellows

As we teach remotely this year, how do we know how we are doing? How do we keep students engaged, and make sure we are achieving our goals for section? In this seminar, TFs teaching this spring will be able to explore a different topic related to student learning, feedback and engagement each week. We will focus on active learning and inclusive teaching activities, and consider ways to build and maintain community, keep students engaged, and keep you (as the instructor) in touch with how they are doing and what they are learning. The seminar will...

Many of us look forward to the holiday season as a time for joy, togetherness, and hope for new beginnings. This year, however, it may be harder to summon a festive spirit, as we are all living with some of the symptoms of loss—mourning the canceled celebrations with friends and family, and looking back on a pandemic year marked by extraordinary economic, social, and political stress. Now more than ever we can learn from the many artists and authors who have chronicled their own experiences of loss, and of the insights and wisdom that sustained them through trying times. In lieu of our...

Communicate your scholarship, engage your audience, speak with presence...even in Zoom!

Erika Bailey, Head of Voice and Speech, American Repertory Theater; Lecturer on Theater, Dance & Media

Are you preparing for conference talks or academic interviews this winter? When we think about communicating our research, we often focus on the material we want to share, what we should say.... Read more about Engaged Communication for Zoom Conference and Job Talks

This October, the Culture and Communication Consultants at the Professional Communication Program for International Teachers & Scholars at the Bok Center will be hosting two Game Times for international PhD students! Learn about American culture, connect with undergraduates and other international PhD students, and play games! We will play games like Taboo, Pictionary, or other active games to practice speaking skills like rephrasing and...

This October, the Culture and Communication Consultants at the Professional Communication Program for International Teachers & Scholars at the Bok Center will be hosting two Game Times for international PhD students! Learn about American culture, connect with undergraduates and other international PhD students, and play games! We will play games like Taboo, Pictionary, or other active games to practice speaking skills like rephrasing and...

Maya Anjur-Dietrich, Applied Physics, HGSU-UAW Interim Grievance Committee Co-Chair
Tim Barker, History

This session will provide a brief orientation to the Harvard Graduate Students Union-UAW (HGSU-UAW). Presenters will discuss the benefits and rights contained in the union's first contract, ways the union can help Teaching Fellows with workplace issues, and mechanisms of contract enforcement, as well as future plans.

This session is part of the Fall Teaching Conference, which is designed to prepare new and experienced...