Capstone Projects, 2022-2023

Ethan Goodnight

Chair Robin Bernstein and I co-taught AmSt 314: Pedagogy and Professional Development. We designed a series of assignments to help rising G-3s prepare for their first semesters of teaching. For my part, I set up a micro-teaching assignment for students, curated readings on effective section teaching, held 1-on-1 observations and consultations, and led discussion groups on soliciting feedback, among other topics. For Professional Development, I coordinated a prospectus-sharing workshop for the students. Our class also focused on the politics involved in teaching sensitive topics; we integrated these concerns into the fabric of the course.

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Aurora Allshouse

I was inspired by "backwards design" to create a resource for TFs based on the most common questions I received as PF. The result--the Anthropology TF sharepoint-- functions as a launchpad for TFs to find and access all teaching-related materials. Throughout the year, I collated handouts and readings used in our pedagogy course, tutorials, useful links, and more into this one location. The sharepoint also hosts two collaborative document libraries: one for archived course materials and one for general teaching resources. My hope is that collating all these resources into a permanent, easy-to-navigate location will make them more accessible and more likely to be used by TFs beyond their time in the pedagogy course.

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Emily Epperson

My work as a Bok PF involved 1) conducting class observations and video consultations, 2) co-teaching two Bok seminars, and 3) creating a language teaching guide. The observations and seminars were demonstrations of how the same active learning strategies are effective in teaching in different disciplines. The language teaching guide provides a general overview of community building, in-class activities, and feedback strategies for TFs who are new to teaching languages. It includes annotated links to research on each topic. It is the result of input, recommendations, and shared materials from directors of language programs, preceptors, and TFs in different departments.

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Lauren Sullivan

As the Bok Pedagogy Fellow in STEM, I had the incredible opportunity to discuss pedagogy with a wide range of STEM TFs and observe classes across STEM disciplines. Cross-discipline observations offer a wealth of previously unconsidered and innovative teaching practices. However, it may feel initially daunting to offer relevant insight. Upon reflection on the commonality between STEM fields and the deep resource of peer observation, I created a handout resource using the “Bok guide” format to provide a foundation for TFs to conduct insightful observations outside of their field with confidence.

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Nicholas Thyr

The three documents on display here represent a sample of draft teaching workshops I created over the past academic year. These will help ensure graduate students in our department (Celtic Languages and Literatures) are prepared to confront the particular challenges provided by our array of classes, which feature languages (Welsh, Irish, Breton, Scottish Gaelic) and literary conventions most undergraduates have a passing knowledge of, at best. The department does not yet have an official teaching colloquium; we hope revised versions of these workshops will appear in one by 2025.

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Dave Song

As a PF in Chemistry and Chemical Biology my role has been facilitating the growth of our G1s as reflective educators as well as serving as a liaison between members of CCB and the Bok Center. This year, I focused on enhancing the quality of microteaching, incorporating an inclusive and equitable teaching for chemistry workshop with Ashlie Sandoval, garnering actionable mid- and end-of-year feedback from students, implementing minor modifications to the Chem 301 curriculum to fulfill requirements of the Bok Teaching Certificate, and improving CCB/Bok Center engagement interactions. This CCB PF Capstone Space presents the highlights of some of these efforts.

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Sam Veroneau

This year we sought to critically reflect on the pedagogy practicum in the chemistry department: gauging graduate student interest while assessing which course components were the most relevant to their future teaching responsibilities. We approached this through both anonymous surveys for graduate students–collecting specific information on each course component–and through conversations with current teaching fellows and course heads. Through these efforts, and after thoughtful internal discussions, we have focused the aims of our course, offloaded certain components to more relevant offices in the chemistry department, and hopefully tailored our practicum to better engage future cohorts.

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Jorge Wong-Medina

My capstone project seeks to address three issues: 1) the lack of ready-made curricula and assignments for TFs teaching Ancient Greek in the department; 2) the variable degrees of student engagement with our textbook, Reading Greek, outside of the classroom; 3) the lack of exercises targeting reading comprehension in Reading Greek. I have drafted reading comprehension questions for the first 13 sections of Reading Greek, which covers the first year of instruction. These reading comprehension questions written in Ancient Greek emphasize the vocabulary and grammar of each section, ensuring that the students get repetition with the grammar and vocabulary that they are practicing. These questions are archived as Canvas quizzes that will be cloned into subsequent course pages for Greek 1 and 2. They can be assigned before or after the reading is covered in class to diagnose student progress and what areas of the text and grammar may require more attention.

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Carly Yingst

The handout for my capstone project summarizes a major part of my year's work as pedagogy fellow: the redesign of the syllabus for the English department's teaching colloquium. In response to a new sequence of proseminars in our department--one of which now directly addresses professional development, formerly a topic covered in the teaching colloquium--the new course-head and I collaborated to develop a new pedagogy curriculum, one which now devotes more time teaching practice (in the form of weekly teaching demos) and developing more robust community conversations around pedagogy. I also had several discussions with this year's teaching colloquium cohort throughout the year, asking them for feedback on the course’s new approach with an eye toward identifying ways that future leaders of the colloquium can continue to build on the foundations this year's new syllabus laid for encouraging practice and community conversations. These potential new directions--including encouraging early teaching practice, building an informal peer TF mentorship program, and developing a teaching resource bank--are outlined on the second page of the handout.

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Elizabeth Hentschel

As the pedagogy fellow for the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator (GHELI), my primary responsibilities included facilitating global health focused workshops, managing the hiring process for GENED 1063: World Health Challenges and Opportunities, and co-creating section guides alongside the instructional design specialist. Our workshops highlighted key themes in equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, such as characteristics of effective listening, and equity-minded syllabus design. The focus of my capstone project is a snapshot of one of the workshops we generated, which we moved online to GHELI’s repository. These workshop teaching packs included interactive videos we filmed in GHELI’s studio and online workshop materials. The workshops serve as a global public good, and the online platform ensures that the resources are accessible to all interested teachers.

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Julia Coyoli

For my capstone project, I present the syllabus from Gov3002b, which was taught for the first time in Spring 2023. This year, in the Government Department, we decided to offer an optional second semester to our pedagogy course. In the Fall semester, graduate students learn about the fundamentals of teaching, with a focus on the role of a TF. In the Spring semester, graduate students instead focus on teaching as part of their career.

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Anna Bisikalo

In conversations with graduate student TFs in our Pedagogy Colloquium, I heard about a range of faculty approaches to working with teaching fellows. Most TFs have very productive working relationships with course heads, but some reported miscommunication. For this project, I surveyed History TFs to learn about a) the typical responsibilities of a TF in the department and b) how course heads collaborate with TFs. This summary document represents a snapshot of teaching experiences in the department, and offers suggestions for standardizing certain aspects. Future PFs can use it as a gauge of typical TF work, and can build off of it to make further suggestions to the department.

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Iman Darwish

My capstone project for this year will be a syllabus for a semester-long pedagogy class. This year was the first time we have a pedagogy class, despite the many challenges, specifically scheduling, it was very positive first step towards institutionalizing this training in the department. In light of this effort, I thought of preparing a syllabus that could be used for future iterations of this course. This effort should complement the canvas website on “Pedagogy and Teaching in the History of Science Department” which I created last year. It’s my hope that both these efforts will continue to outlast my tenure in the department and will provide a basis for further development and institutionalization of a pedagogy in the History of Science department.

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Wei-Fang Hsieh

This capstone project highlights the timeline of various workshops, community-building events, and pedagogy trainings that I organized or taught as the 2022-2023 Pedagogy Fellow. Some accomplishments include a pre-semester workshop for first-time TFs, one-on-one syllabus consultations for tutorial instructors, video consultations for G4 TFs, an active and inclusive teaching workshop and a syllabus workshop in LING 241: Practicum for G2s, and roundtables and social events for TFs to share their experiences. I hope that our current TFs and future TFs have developed skills, gained confidence, and felt supported.

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Gwyneth Moreland

My main project for the year was assisting with the Teaching Undergraduate Mathematics Seminar, a teaching training course for our department’s G1s. I assisted in planning and executing the lessons, as well as running microteaching sessions. I also helped run the yearly Teaching Tutorials seminar, where graduate students can learn about Math 99r, which allows them to design and teach their own course.

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Mary Richardson

I had three focus areas this year as the MCB Pedagogy Fellow. The first was to conduct video consultations for TFs, TAs, and CAs in the department. I coordinated with the preceptors for LS1a (fall) and LS1b (spring) to record and consult with many of their teaching staff. My second primary focus was to teach the pedagogy course MCB 327 (spring). This is only the second year the course has run. I worked with members of the department to add practical exercises, including real examples of assignments and lessons from MCB courses. Finally, my third goal was to expand office hours by holding an informal coffee hour every week.

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Lee Cannon-Brown

Calling on students in class can be fraught for at least two reasons: for teachers, it can entail burdensome logistics and politics, sometimes even distracting from classroom activity; and for students, it can feel unfair, or possibly even personally motivated. I attempt to solve for both of these difficulties with my WarmCaller app. With its simple user interface, WarmCaller randomizes the order in which all students in a class are called on, exhaustively and with no student repeated. The app is designed to introduce a fun, non-human agency into the classroom, and to facilitate easy, democratic, and non-personal student participation. Download a compressed (zipped) version of WarmCaller, which should run on any Mac machine.

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Denise Yoon

My work this year focused on strengthening the first year graduate seminar course, OEB399, and creating a curriculum that prepares grad students for their life and teaching at Harvard and in OEB. By centering community within the G1 cohort and providing structure and real experience with pedagogical techniques, I hoped to provide a space in which first year students can grow and thrive with their colleagues and begin to find their place in their labs and within OEB. By creating learning modules that will stay with the department after my tenure as the Pedagogy Fellow, I hope that future OEB399 classes will be high quality and standardized from year to year.

In addition to the work that I did in restructuring the overall course content, I also emphasized principles of inclusive teaching, creating a unit on inclusive pedagogy, which involved workshops, a panel from the History of Science department, and case studies on LGBTQ+ inclusive language in collaboration with Roya Huang, a former PF in MCB.

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Akshita Srinivasan

As a Pedagogy Fellow, my primary goals were to 1) help TFs launch into their first semester of teaching at Harvard and to 2) help them think about teaching and mentoring in academia more broadly. We accomplished these goals using weekly peer support and reflection, guest lectures with different professors sharing their perspectives on the same topic, and practice using real examples from the courses that the TFs were teaching.

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Kelsey Hanson Woodruff

In the fall semester, together with the HDS teaching fellow liaison, I put on a series of workshops aimed at TFs at different experience levels that focused on the academic job market, difficult conversations in the classroom, and providing feedback to student writing. We also held check-ins, like office hours, where TFs could discuss teaching issues in person or on zoom. In the spring, we facilitated the second annual course, Pedagogy in the Study of Religion. The course focuses on pedagogy in the religion classroom. We had rich discussions with faculty members who shared their teaching experiences, methods, and philosophies.

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Lisa Kostur & Giulia Pellizzato

We designed a new tool for supporting PhD students in their teaching training and professors in their teaching work: a Mentorship Alliance. In the framework of a customizable agreement of mutual accountability, a PhD student and a professor will work together (intra- or inter-departmentally) towards innovating a course, its assignments and its assessment strategies, practicing engaging teaching and discussion leading, while being in dialogue as mentor/mentee and reflective practitioners. We piloted this strategy with RomLang 230, thanks to the proto-mentorship alliance we built with Maria Luisa Parra and Virginie Greene. We co-organized events for the RLL Engagement Series, we organized a panel on teaching and the job market, and we organized social events for TFs and TAs to foster a strong and interconnected community among new teachers in the Department.

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Ike Lage

SEAS hires around 120 graduate TFs a semester, 50-60 of whom are first time TFs. Of these, only around half of them completed the required training consisting of a short orientation, a microteaching, and a self-study online learning module. We highlight specific challenges related to logistics of organizing the trainings, motivation of TFs to attend them, and mis-alignment between TF responsibilities and the content of the trainings. We make three suggestions for improving the training process going forward: 1) developing a Canvas site to organize the training; 2) broadening the practice component to better reflect TF duties; and 3) formalizing learning goals for the training in a way that can be communicated to TFs.

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Rachael Neidinger

My capstone project was to answer a question that a student once asked me: “How can you use non-binary language in Russian?” My research showed me that there is no single answer to this question, so I decided to create a series of handouts meant for students and instructors to help provide the linguistic, cultural, and gender theory background they would need to understand the possible answers. My project starts with Russian, but I hope this project continues to develop with language-specific handouts since each Slavic culture is unique.

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John Towey

This project is a description of the principles, benefits, and challenges of universal design, and a description of the principles’ application to course design. The goal of the project is to encourage sociology instructors to design their courses in accordance with universal design guidelines. Universal Design is defined as the process of designing products, services, and environments in a way that makes them usable to as many people as possible without individual accommodation for functional limitations. Design that incorporates the principles of universal design tends to benefit everyone, but it can be difficult to take all functional limitations into account with a single, one-size-fits-all approach. However, despite its name, universal design for learning is a set of guidelines for designing courses with multiple options for student engagement, representation of material and assignments, and active participation and expression.

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Xiang Meng

My work with the pedagogy course included practice teaching and concept discussions. While students appreciated practice teaching more, concept discussions were also useful. Student surveys showed improvement in visual aids use, pacing, and confidence. I conducted the survey on why teaching matters in statistics to motivate G1s and help G2+ and faculty reflect on their values. The results showed that teaching has taught people communication, humility, insight, and statistics. As teachers, participants in the survey said that they learned to aim for deep understanding and see statistics ideas from many perspectives. Teaching is important to help students become statistically well-educated citizens.

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