The Bok Center is proud to support the Harvard Horizons program, which highlights the exciting scholarship of GSAS PhD students across disciplines. Each year, eight PhD candidates are chosen to receive in-depth, personalized mentoring and coaching designed to enhance their presentation skills. The program culminates in a symposium of brief, compelling talks where these scholars...

Are you a SEAS PhD student who wants to learn more about teaching, communication, or presentation skills?

Are you an international PhD student who would like to talk to someone about cross-cultural communication or your English speaking skills?

Sarah Emory, the Bok Center’s Assistant Director for International Teachers and Scholars, is available for drop-in consultations and questions every Thursday from 1:30-3:30pm in SEC 2.323-Library Seminar Room.

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Are you interested in connecting with other international PhD students and practicing your English in a friendly, informal setting? Join our discussion group! International PhD students have the opportunity to connect with each other and our...

As we all prepare for another semester of teaching unsettled by the pandemic, you may be wondering what you can do as a Teaching Fellow to promote positive mental health outcomes for your students and fellow instructors while also...

Led by:
Marlon Kuzmick, Director of the Learning Lab, and Learning Lab Staff

How do you use visuals to help your audience develop a schema to understand your work? In this session, you will explore how to communicate your work visually, and how visuals communicate structure to help your audience understand the main idea, whether you are teaching or presenting your research. You will explore the different roles visuals can play in a talk, analyze examples, learn some key principles of visual design, and practice with different tools to...

Led by:
Sarah Emory, Assistant Director, International Teachers and Scholars

What role does culture play in the classroom? What are the classroom norms at Harvard and how might undergraduate education here differ from your own experiences? In this interactive workshop, we will explore teaching and learning across cultures by reflecting on culture and its impact on classroom interactions like participating in discussions, presenting information, asking questions, building rapport, giving and receiving feedback, or even handling conflict. We will...

Led by:
Eleanor Finnegan, Assistant Director, Faculty Programming

What are the goals of a course, and how does it fit into a discipline? What are the different components and how do they fit together? Done well, a good syllabus can be a road map, a contract, and a guide for both instructors and students. 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 look at sample syllabi to...

Led by:
Jonah Johnson, Assistant Director, Writing Pedagogy

From an instructor’s perspective, students’ progress from “doing the readings” to “turning in the paper” can feel like a black box: How do reading and class discussion turn into words on the page? In this session, we will bring that process out into the light, modeling practical approaches to writing assignments that will help your students engage with every stage of the writing process—from class discussion itself to formulating a possible thesis to working with evidence to other pre-draft...

Led by:
Adam Beaver, Director of Pedagogy

What is a scholar in your discipline actually doing when they are “reading"? How did you learn to perform all of the moves that an effective reader performs? How can you help your students learn to do the same? In this session we will break down what it really means to “read” across our scholarly disciplines. We’ll deconstruct our own disciplinary reading practices, and brainstorm how students new to a discipline can learn to become more skilled readers in it.  We’ll consider what novice reading looks...

Led by:
Pamela Pollock, Director of Professional Development

We may wonder or worry about how we’re doing as teachers-- but how do we know?! As scholars, we are always developing our research, but how do we think about learning and growing as a teacher? In this session, we will consider the nature of feedback as well as strategies for collecting it and using it to improve our practice. We will explore Stephen Brookfield’s lenses for reflective teaching-- 1) self, 2) students, 3) colleagues, and 4) scholarship-- to consider these questions and build...

Led by:
Julia Judge Mulhall, Bok Pedagogy Fellow and PhD Student in Classics, with other experienced TFs

Developing as a teacher means learning from yourself, and your peers, as well as having some teaching mentors. In this interactive panel discussion, explore key topics in teaching with experienced TFs. They will discuss their approaches to 1) organization and time management, 2) working on a teaching team, 3) building rapport, connecting with students and working to build an inclusive classroom, and 4) how your own identity as a teacher affects your...