Building a Culture of Teaching Excellence and Connection Across Harvard

As part of the 2026 HILT Conference, “The Weight of the Degree: Rigor, Responsibility, and the Modern Campus,” the Bok Center successfully proposed and co-organized an interactive breakout session titled “Teaching and Mentoring New Teachers to Foster a Teaching Culture of Excellence and Connection.” Co-led by Matthew Sohm (Assistant Director, Civil Discourse and Classroom Culture) and Hannah Waits (Postdoctoral Fellow, Civil Discourse), alongside colleagues from the Harvard Business School (HBS) and the Harvard Medical School (HMS), this session offered a forum for faculty and staff from across the University to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of onboarding new teachers. Drawing together panelists from the Bok Center, the FAS, HBS, and HMS, the session stimulated reflection and cross-campus dialogue about teacher training initiatives and other efforts to promote a Harvard teaching culture. 

The session opened with brief reflections from the faculty panelists - Karen Thornber (Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Bok Center, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard College Professor), Wills Emmons (Senior Lecturer of Business Administration, Director, C. Roland Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning, HBS) and Taralyn Tan (Assistant Dean for Educational Innovation and Scholarship, Lecturer on Neurobiology, HMS). Thornber discussed the competing pressures on FAS faculty and highlighted the Bok Center’s efforts to ensure that new instructors at all levels in the FAS have the pedagogical tools to teach effectively, particularly with regard to key challenges in teaching today (e.g. teaching in the age of AI and fostering open dialogue in the classroom). Emmons discussed HBS’ teaching-focused culture centering on the case study method, in which it’s customary for faculty to consider their teaching duties as a central part of their overall professional obligations and to collaborate with the Christensen Center on multiple aspects of their teaching. Tan, by contrast, highlighted the sheer scale of different types of teachers at HMS: from the thousands of clinical staff who also hold teaching appointments to core faculty members and Ph.D. students. 

After these brief lightning talks, session participants worked in small groups to respond to a series of questions. What would a meaningful teaching culture of excellence and connection look like within your program/school/unit? Which teaching roles are a part of building this culture (e.g. TFs, non-ladder faculty, visiting faculty, junior ladder faculty, senior faculty, etc.)? By the end of the discussion, participants were asked to share questions and/or identify 1-2 portable opportunities, strategies, or questions via a Padlet submission form.

In the final part of the session, the faculty panelists responded to some of the questions and comments shared by participants. A common theme in their responses was to identify onboarding and induction opportunities that would maximize the impact on classroom teaching. Thornber, for instance, highlighted the Bok Center’s recent efforts to train all instructional support staff (TFs, TAs, and CAs) in the FAS as an approach that, because of the number of instructors involved (2300) and their close proximity to students, promised to maximize impact in a relatively short period of time. The speakers also considered the balance of supporting long-term teachers (e.g. ladder faculty) with the training demanded by newer, time-limited roles. Participants especially appreciated the multi-school make-up of the presenters and found the content to be informative about the challenges and opportunities related to fostering a teaching culture of excellence and connection.