This year marks the 18th cohort of the Bok Center’s Pedagogy Fellows Program, a collaboration between the Bok Center, academic departments, and the Office of Undergraduate Education. Each year, we teach more than 25 Pedagogy Fellows to be teaching consultants, to identify needs and develop resources on teaching and professional development for their peers, and, in many cases, to lead their departments’ pedagogy courses. The program aims to support all Harvard PhD students in their roles as undergraduate teachers, and to provide a cohort of excellent graduate student teachers with the opportunity to join a community of practice at the Bok Center.
Our approach to pedagogical training can be summed up by our framework for the Bok Teaching Certificate: learn, practice, and reflect. At its core, successful pedagogy training includes all three of these elements. Students should have the opportunity to learn key ideas and best practices for teaching in their disciplines; practice applying them in a variety of ways; and have the chance to reflect on their growth and development as teachers in community with their colleagues.
As both students and teachers of teaching, the Pedagogy Fellows learn to get feedback from a variety of sources, including their students, their peers, and their Bok and faculty mentors, and to view the teaching they do at Harvard as part of a continuous journey of growth and development. Lee Cannon-Brown, Pedagogy Fellow in Music, summarizes the breadth of his training at the Bok Center: “Being a Department Pedagogy Fellow has allowed me to gain insights about teaching from a much broader perspective than TFing alone allowed. Over the course of this year, I have contributed to my department’s pedagogy course and fostered community and growth among my colleagues; I have reflected on the ways my pedagogical practices impact students; and I have learned principles about professionalization that extend far beyond music studies.”
The cohort meets as an interdisciplinary seminar on Friday mornings over the course of the academic year. In these meetings, they learn about key topics in teaching and learning, which they can both integrate into their own teaching practice and share with TFs in their home departments. The PFs also have the opportunity to connect with fellow graduate students from across disciplines and learn about the widely varying contexts of teaching and research in departments across the FAS. The impact of the PF community on individual PFs can be profound:
“While I expected to learn about pedagogical theories and classroom techniques, which I certainly did, I was surprised by how much I learned about the inner workings of the university and of my department. This was edifying for me personally, but also it helped me work as a liaison between first time teachers who were usually encountering university teaching for the first time, and highly experienced faculty who were well-acquainted with university/departmental bureaucracy and modes of work therein. A major part of this learning process was the discussions among PFs in our weekly seminars. These helped me understand what was specific to my department, specific to the humanities, and specific to Harvard itself.”
- Anna Bisikalo, Pedagogy Fellow in History
“As the Pedagogy Fellow for SEAS this year, I gained valuable experience teaching and engaging with other PFs across disciplinary backgrounds both within SEAS, and across all of Harvard. Interacting with people with a shared commitment to teaching, but with widely varied disciplinary backgrounds helped me to understand some shared important components of good teaching (student engagement and agency, clearly communicating value) as well as aspects of distinct disciplinary styles (e.g. relying more heavily on slides vs. narratives, and working through problem sets vs. writing). This gave me a richer sense of the possibilities involved in teaching, and how many ways there are to be a good teacher, which makes me really excited to explore and put into practice different approaches to teaching that I have learned about."
- Ike Lage, Pedagogy Fellow in SEAS
At the end of the year, the PFs complete a capstone project, including a reflective statement, to consolidate what they’ve learned and share highlights from their work. The capstone projects reflect the range of contexts, opportunities, and interests the PFs encounter in their work. This year’s capstones include: Mary Richardson’s efforts to sustain a new pedagogy course in Molecular and Cellular Biology, including a pre- and post survey of TF needs in the department; Lisa Kostur and Giulia Pellizzato’s idea to develop a mentorship alliance program in Romance Languages and Literatures; Carly Yingst’s work on a new syllabus for English 350: A Teaching Colloquium; and Bok Pedagogy Fellow Lauren Sullivan’s guide to peer observation in STEM classrooms.
PFs presented their projects and fielded questions from each other, Bok staff, and guests from departments and the FAS in a capstone session, which was held in-person for the first time since 2019. PFs were prompted to share feedback with their peers and to vote on projects and presentations using color-coded stickers. This made for an especially vibrant session and sparked deeper reflection on the varied work the PFs undertake each year. Gwyneth Moreland, Pedagogy Fellow in Math, remarked, “I am excited by the idea of potentially implementing some of the ideas from my fellow PFs in the future. I think some of the professional development workshops they discussed were quite useful, and I also saw some PFs creating websites and repositories of old teaching materials, which is an incredibly useful resource.” We’ve added this year’s projects to the Pedagogy Fellow Capstone Gallery, which continues to expand with each cohort and stands as a testament to the creativity and energy that the PFs bring to the program.
Visit the Pedagogy Fellows Capstone Gallery
We look forward to welcoming the 19th cohort of Pedagogy Fellows in August and to the questions the new year will bring, as we continue our collaborations with departments and graduate students across the FAS.