News

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Celebrating Bok Teaching Certificate Recipients

May 7, 2020

The Bok Center is excited to recognize and celebrate this year’s Bok Teaching Certificate Recipients!

The Bok Teaching Certificate gives GSAS PhD students a tangible marker of their ongoing commitment to developing as teachers in higher education. Guided by three principles—Learn, Practice, Reflect—those who pursue the Certificate explore different topics in teaching and learning through departmental pedagogy courses and...

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Gold Star Teaching

May 5, 2020

From the moment courses moved online in March, Bok Center undergraduate fellows have been compiling a list of effective moves and design choices that faculty and TFs have performed in the new distance-learning environment. Aware that their instructors were making the difficult transition to a new teaching dynamic, they sought to identify and recognize exceptional moments and “moves.” The students playfully use the term “Gold Star Teaching Moves” to reference the iconic symbol of classroom achievement in grade-school, and to indicate the way in which they are inverting the flow...

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Phil Lai

Lab 3D: The Success of Virtual Labs in OEB 126

May 4, 2020

When word came that courses would be moving online for the remainder of Spring 2020, Learning Lab Graduate Fellow Phil Fahn-Lai knew that the science course for which they are a Teaching Fellow would face a particular challenge. Labs in OEB 126: Vertebrate Evolution, taught by Prof. Stephanie E. Pierce, involve visits to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, where students view and interact with fossil specimens from the Museum’s Vertebrate Paleontology collection. The labs reinforce information learned...

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Poetry Month and Poem in your Pocket Day

May 1, 2020

One of the things we love most about our work in the Learning Lab is the challenge of responding quickly and dynamically to unusual requests in creative assignment design. One way we foster this dynamism is by leveraging our Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows (LLUFs), whose intuitions about what mediums and modes will appeal most to their peers yields ideas and resources that can be translated into the classroom in surprising ways. While the LLUFs certainly aren’t as expert as the faculty when it comes to the course material, they are inarguably experts on their own experiences...

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