Led by:
Yasemin Kalender, Assistant Director, Science Pedagogy

Growth mindset—the belief that your skills and intelligence are malleable and can be improved with hard work and practice—has been shown to be a vital aspect of learning. In this session, we will focus on developing a growth mindset for ourselves and for our students, and why both are important. It is often all too easy to think of ourselves as finished products with set skills, but this can hinder our attempts to be willing to learn new knowledge and skills. Fostering a “growth mindset”...

Led by:
Pamela Pollock, Director of Professional Development
Rebecca Miller Brown, Assistant Director, Graduate Student Programming

Are you a new Teaching Fellow, wondering how to prepare for your first semester of teaching? PhD students who have completed the self-study modules on our Hit the Ground Running Canvas site are invited to this interactive workshop where we will review key components of each core module, starting with...

Led by Sarah Emory

This seminar is designed to help international graduate students develop the oral communication skills necessary to be successful in their graduate programs, with a particular emphasis on skills necessary for teaching in the Harvard classroom. Students will work on improving their oral English comprehensibility and accuracy, learn and practice general pedagogical strategies for teaching interactively, improve their impromptu speaking skills, and build their ability to interact effectively with undergraduates. The course is designed for students who have not...

Led by Pamela Pollock

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 seminar, we will use Stephen Brookfield’s lenses for reflective teaching-- 1) self, 2) students, 3) colleagues, and 4) scholarship-- as a framework to consider these questions and build our own toolkit for becoming critically reflective teacher-scholars. We will review, discuss, and model effective mechanisms for collecting feedback, making sense of it, and...

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

How do our cultures inform how we communicate, how we learn, and how we teach? New international PhD students navigate communication at Harvard on multiple levels: as students, as scholars, and as future teachers. In this interactive seminar, we will explore how our cultural values influence our communication in a range of academic and classroom situations. You will have the opportunity to learn, practice, and get feedback on cross-cultural communication skills for Harvard classrooms and beyond, with sessions devoted to academic culture, undergraduate...

Led by Yasemin Kalender and Jonah Johnson

How students get feedback from TFs and how they assess their own learning tend to reflect disciplinary norms, and what these norms look like—at least on the surface—can seem very different in STEM and the Humanities. Beneath the surface, though, the best practices for designing assignments and providing feedback are fundamentally the same, whether the feedback is on a p-set or an essay. In this interactive seminar, led by the Bok Center’s Assistant Director for Writing and Assistant Director for Science Pedagogy, we will explore a...

Led by Rebecca Miller Brown

Instructors in the humanities and social sciences are not simply teaching the content or methodologies of their fields; they are charged with teaching students to become critical thinkers and readers, thoughtful discussion participants, and strong academic writers. As a scholar in your discipline, these skills may seem intuitively related, but how do you design your sections so that students understand the connections? How can you articulate your priorities and make sure students know what is expected of them and why? This seminar is designed to...

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...

During this 3-day synchronous training, graduate student teachers will have the chance to explore, discuss, and practice the fundamentals of teaching 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 the Fall Teaching Conference, 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....

During this 3-day synchronous training, graduate student teachers will have the chance to explore, discuss, and practice the fundamentals of teaching 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 the Fall Teaching Conference, 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....

Graduate student teachers are invited to join these facilitated discussions to consider key issues as we transition back to campus and to in-person teaching. Back Again sessions will run daily from August 23 to August 26.

This session is part of the Fall Teaching Conference, 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. Learn more ...

Graduate student teachers are invited to take advantage of the opportunity to practice presenting a short lesson and get feedback from an experienced facilitator and a small group of your peers. Practice teaching sessions will run daily from August 23 to August 26.

This session is part of the Fall Teaching Conference, 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. Learn more...