Pedagogy & Practice News

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Congratulations to the 2020 Derek C. Bok Award Recipients

July 1, 2020

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2020 Derek C. Bok Award!

The Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching of Undergraduates is given each year by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to five teaching fellows who have been nominated by their departments. The award includes a $1,000 prize from a gift given by David G. Nathan '51, M.D. '55 (Robert A. Stranahan Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School) and his wife Jean Louise Friedman Nathan.

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Erin Hutchinson

Reflections from a Recently Graduated Pedagogy Fellow

June 30, 2020

With the celebration of Harvard’s first-ever virtual Commencement now complete, the Bok Center bids a fond farewell to another cohort of alumni, including dozens of undergraduate and graduate student fellows. Though they may have received their degrees in topics ranging from Hebrew Philology to Human Evolutionary Biology, their shared commitment to cultivating a community of thoughtful and reflective teachers and communicators here at Harvard will serve all of them well in their future careers. We are proud of their many accomplishments, and look forward to hearing great things...

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New Pedagogy Fellows Opportunity for Departments

June 12, 2020

The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning is excited to announce that as part of the enhanced instructional support for remote teaching, departments that currently do not participate in the Pedagogy Fellows Program will be invited to apply to join for the 2020–2021 academic year. Pedagogy Fellows collaborate with faculty, administration, and the Bok Center’s senior staff to enhance training and support for teaching fellows within their departments and across the FAS. Consult the...

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UPFs Ashley and Skylar deliver a faculty workshop.

Student Identities Online: Equity and Access in the Zoom Classroom

May 22, 2020

March and April are always a busy time for the Bok Center’s nine Undergraduate Pedagogy Fellows (UPFs). In the pre-COVID-19 era, they would spend these months visiting departments and programs across the FAS, delivering workshops on student identities and classroom power dynamics to Teaching Fellows (TFs) and faculty. This year, instead, they found themselves moving their work online. As the semester comes to a close, the UPFs reflect on how online teaching and learning has surfaced new ways for them to help instructors think about the undergraduate experience.

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The Showcase Must Go On: Pedagogy Fellows’ Capstone Projects Go Virtual

May 21, 2020

As classes at Harvard moved online, so too did the Bok Center’s Pedagogy Fellows Program, comprising 33 experienced and creative graduate students who support their peers in their roles as undergraduate teachers. Pedagogy Fellows (PFs) collaborate with faculty, department administrators, and the Bok Center’s senior staff to enhance training and support for teaching fellows within their departments and across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences by leading pedagogy seminars and workshops, consulting with TFs, and developing...

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book open on table

Poetry Without Borders—or a Classroom

May 11, 2020

On 11 March, as Harvard students hurriedly packed up their dorm rooms, attended their final face-to-face course meetings, and said tearful goodbyes to their friends and mentors, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Stephanie Sandler composed an email to her students in GENED 1057: Poetry Without Borders. Reassuring them that their course would carry on with a refreshed...

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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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virtual Egyptian gallery

For the Future of Learning, Look to… Ancient Egypt

April 30, 2020

At the Bok Center we’re fortunate to be able to partner with a wide array of instructors and courses, from engineering labs to writing seminars. These partnerships take many different forms, but the one constant is the depth of our engagement. We understand that helping an instructor formulate an effective or innovative experience or assignment is only part of our job. We’re also here to help the instructor bring that idea to life, whether that means offering specialized training to Teaching Fellows, a custom-built web resource to house student work, or workshops and hackathons...

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Apply Now: ABLConnect Teaching Innovator Prize 2019-2020

April 28, 2020

Have you used active learning in your classes? If so, ABLConnect wants to know about it!

If you have developed and used an active learning exercise in your class recently, we'd love for you to submit it to the ABLConnect Teaching Innovator Prize, which celebrates Harvard University instructors who develop and use active learning in their classrooms! This year we are especially interested in submissions related to remote learning....

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Rebecca Brown teaching in front of a chalkboard

Bok Seminars Go Remote

April 27, 2020

As classes at Harvard went online, so too did Bok Seminars, short courses for PhD students covering a range of topics in teaching and learning, from course design to public speaking, taught by the Bok Center’s senior staff and fellows. Reframing our own seminars informed our experience helping faculty and TFs make the transition to teaching remotely. Like instructors across campus, we worried about time zones and students' technical challenges, and gained firsthand experience figuring out how to achieve our core goals under...

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