For Faculty

While faculty can benefit from many kinds of assistance with their teaching, the Bok Center understands that what you need most is a partner to help you think through your goals and ideas, and a support team to help with the challenges of developing new material and experimenting with new modes of teaching. We can help you with course design, with training your teaching staff, and with evolving your classroom practice.

course design

Course Design/Renewal

Many of the faculty with whom we speak are eager to design, or redesign, some (or all) of a new or existing course. Undertaking this work can be daunting, requiring hours of solitary effort with a very uncertain reward.

In addition to the advice found in our online resource repository, the Bok team can lower the bar to pedagogical renewal in numerous ways:

  • Course Design & Delivery. Faculty who wish to develop and/or teach a course with a team of instructional designers are encouraged to engage Bok's 360 faculty support.
  • Gen Ed Consultations. Faculty proposing, developing, teaching, or revising General Education courses are encouraged to take advantage of Bok's enhanced support for Gen Ed.
  • Learning Lab. Faculty who wish to experiment with a new modality of teaching—and to have the opportunity to test an activity or assignment on a team of undergraduate and graduate student fellows—may consider launching a project with the Learning Lab.
Exploratory Seminars

Exploratory Seminars offer faculty a focused collaborative space to deliberate the most urgent problems and potentially transformational opportunities in Higher Education. Held annually, our seminars enable participating faculty to focus on interesting and impactful ideas in teaching and learning, supported by the Bok Center's staff and resources.

Two faculty confer

As a Harvard faculty member, you’ve likely been called upon to act as a mentor. How have you approached these relationships? What have you found to be effective? And which aspects of mentoring have you found to be difficult? Join a mentoring cohort at the Bok Center to engage with faculty colleagues in facilitated conversations about how to set boundaries, listen well, provide feedback, and cultivate your mentees’ independence.

Other Consultations

camera

Class/Video
Observations

The Bok Center was founded in 1975 as a video laboratory, allowing faculty for the first time to experience their own teaching as if they were a student in their class. Four decades later, we still believe that having your lecture or seminar observed and/or recorded, and then debriefed, by a sympathetic but dispassionate member of our senior staff is one of the very best ways to take stock of your teaching style and to brainstorm ways to expand your repertoire.

person

Early
Feedback

The Bok Center encourages all instructors to solicit feedback from their students early and often. There is no need to wait for the end-of-term Q Guide! With the Bok Center's help, you can find out how your students are faring while there's still time to make adjustments. We can help you design a survey or conduct a focus group, and to interpret the results.

1:1

Other Consultations

The fact that one's teaching, unlike the other spheres of faculty life, is relatively free from the constant scrutiny of peer review can be a relief. But it can also make teaching less social or experimental than it might otherwise be. At the Bok Center we are happy to meet one-on-one with faculty about any teaching-related matter, whether it be how to incorporate pedagogy into a grant application, how to respond to student feedback, or how to teach in a new way or at a new scale.

journal club

The Bok Center offers faculty a variety of opportunities to discuss current issues in higher education, including journal clubs and reading groups that meet biweekly or monthly to examine recent literature in teaching and learning.

applied theatre

The Bok Center is pleased to assist the Office for Faculty Affairs in facilitating a program of peer observation for tenure-track faculty in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, designed to support faculty in becoming more reflective and effective as instructors.

Herschbach

The Herschbach Lecture Series brings to campus distinguished scientists who also are deeply involved in education.

Faculty Orientations

Every August the Bok Center participates in the New Faculty Institute and Navigating Harvard orientations sponsored by the Office of Faculty Affairs.