Welcome to the first edition of our new feature, Behind the Bok! Each month we will profile a member of the Bok staff in order for our friends and colleagues to learn more about us, the full range of work that we do, how we approach our work, and what is happening in the world of teaching and learning from different perspectives.

Eleanor Finnegan, Assistant Director, Faculty Programming

Q: What is your educational background?

A: I have three degrees in Religious Studies — a BA in...

In the wake of the attack on the nation’s Capitol last week, President Bacow wrote, “As members of a university community dedicated to truth, learning, research, debate, and service, we condemn ignorance and hatred, and stand in support of the rule of law and the role of knowledge.”

Regardless of your discipline, current events relate in some way to your teaching—whether this means...

We are pleased to share our 2019-20 annual report, which showcases highlights from the year, including how we helped facilitate the transition to remote teaching, examples of courses we supported, and stories of students who have taken part in our programming. Especially given the challenges of the past year, we are proud of the strength of our community, and that we worked with more faculty and graduate students than ever before.

View our annual report.

We are heartbroken to share that our beloved faculty director, Robert Lue, passed away on Wednesday, November 11. Rob was appointed as the inaugural Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning in 2013. He had a vision for a teaching and learning center that would attract and energize faculty, graduate students and undergraduates; that would spark excitement and creativity about what could happen in the classroom; and that would build an intergenerational community around teaching. During the seven years of his tenure, Rob transformed the Bok...

"In 1977 humanity sent a mixtape into outer space. The two spacecraft of NASA’s Voyager mission include a Golden Record, featuring greetings in 55 earth languages, 116 images of the planet and its inhabitants, plus examples of music from a range of cultures across the world: from Azerbaijani bagpipes to Zaire pygmy songs, from English Renaissance dances to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and from Louis Armstrong to Chuck Berry. The samplings of earthbound auditory culture are on their way into the unknown.”

So begins the course description for Alex Rehding’s...

Bok Center staff played an active role in last Friday’s annual Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) conference on Championing Equitable Instruction and Inclusive Classrooms, a topic at the core of our work with instructors at all stages. In addition to our many staff who attended the conference as participants, two Bok staff members led breakout sessions. Pamela Pollock, Director of Professional Development, co-facilitated a breakout session on...

This summer was a busy time at the Bok Center. In the November-December issue of Harvard Magazine, the Bok Center’s Director of Pedagogy Adam Beaver describes some of the ways in which the Bok Center worked with the Office of Undergraduate Education to help faculty prepare to teach remotely this fall. One of the unique challenges facing fall term faculty—one that they did not face in the spring, when they pivoted online halfway through the semester—was the absence of in person meetings where faculty and students  could build rapport and community that could be sustained...

In the midst of a pandemic, many global challenges, and the prospect of a fully remote fall semester, the Bok Center spent the summer grappling with a multitude of questions: How should we prepare graduate student TFs to teach remotely? How could we reimagine our flagship event, the Fall Teaching Conference, usually a bustling two-day conference held in Sever Hall the week before classes start? How could we meet the needs of both new and experienced TFs facing an unprecedented semester?

Like instructors everywhere, we couldn’t take anything for granted. We...

We are pleased to share that we have contributed a chapter to The Routledge International Handbook of Student-Centered Learning and Teaching in Higher Education!  Edited by Sabine Hoidn and Manja Klemenčič, Lecturer on Sociology, the Routledge Handbook provides a comprehensive examination of student-centered learning. Tamara Brenner,...

As we prepare to launch a new academic year, a lot has changed at Harvard—including the terms in which we speak about teaching. Now, in addition to asking how many pages of reading a professor assigns, we’re comparing notes on how they balance the synchronous and asynchronous components of their course, as if we’ve been forming our personal opinions about asynchronous learning for decades rather than mere months. Yet there’s an awful lot about teaching and learning at Harvard that can’t, or won’t, be renamed at the speed of Zoom. So much of what we do in...

During the initial, headlong rush toward online teaching in March, nearly every conversation we had with the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates with whom we work focused on the twin challenges of maintaining continuity and community. Whether we were facilitating faculty workshops, organizing graduate student Zoom trainings, or compiling and writing materials for our new Teaching Remotely website, this focus on continuity and community was at the core of what our partners wanted and what we wanted to help...