Psychology

Peter Aungle

I created a Google Drive folder to harness our PFs’ creativity and flexibility when creating syllabi for our departmental pedagogy course. The folder contains instructions on how to make the most of it, as well as resources and slides organized by topic, syllabi from previous years, contact information for previous PFs, and a list of speakers and topics. Imagine the PF as a chef with the Drive folder as the kitchen: it comes reasonably well-stocked, but it doesn’t have everything – and the chef might want to make something with different ingredients or a new recipe. The folder is a living resource intended to inspire and structure that process, and to be passed on to the next PF in the same spirit.

View Peter's capstone project.

Akshita Srinivasan

As a Pedagogy Fellow, my primary goals were to 1) help TFs launch into their first semester of teaching at Harvard and to 2) help them think about teaching and mentoring in academia more broadly. We accomplished these goals using weekly peer support and reflection, guest lectures with different professors sharing their perspectives on the same topic, and practice using real examples from the courses that the TFs were teaching.

View Akshita's capstone project.

Arunima Sarin

I was the Pedagogy fellow for Psychology. My department mandates a yearlong pedagogy course for all new TFs. A challenge for me was to show the value of the course. I wanted to demonstrate that good teaching required thought, planning, and practice. I did this with a two-tier strategy. Our fall sessions focused on micro-skills (like active learning and leading discussions) that the TFs could put straight to their teaching, while in the spring sessions focused on macro skills (like philosophy of teaching, and motivation) to encourageTFs to reflect on their teaching. Over the course of the year, I found increased engagement and reflection in my TFs, managed to create an inclusive and open classroom, and had the most fun I have ever had teaching a class solo for the first time!

View Arunima's capstone project.

Adam Mastroianni

Fall 2020 was a moment of crisis: we were mid-pandemic and just coming off a summer of protests for racial justice. The syllabus I inherited was from a different time and needed some redesigning to reflect the current moment. I made the following changes:

• Starting off with microteaching so that the first time TFs were teaching was not in their own classroom
• Bringing in a guest from Minerva, an online startup university that has been teaching online since before it was cool
• Then shifting to diversity, equity and inclusion by bringing in a group of students to talk about their experiences in the psych department. You can’t include people if you don’t know who they are.
• Finally, I brought in our new Director of Graduate Studies for an exercise in which we read some DEI scenarios that might come up, then discussed solutions.

View Adam's capstone project.

Tanya Levari

Instructional Styles in Psychology is a year-long course that all 3rd year psychology graduate students are required to take concurrently with their first year of teaching. The main goals of the course are to provide practical and emotional support for TFs teaching for the first time and to provide opportunities for them to practice, develop, and reflect upon their skills as teacher. These goals are primarily accomplished through classroom discussions, assignments, and guest lectures.

View Tanya's capstone project.