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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
