By describing periodicals from the 1840’s for the class, students in Elisa New’s seminar begin to understand the course material and find a voice in the classroom.
This close reading activity challenges students to “translate” poetry into propositional statements in order to make students more attentive to the nuances of language.
For Professor Kiely’s freshman seminar, the students chose their favorite paintings depicting the life of Jesus and gave presentations about their impressions of the art.
This Statistics 100 project has students develop an interesting question and analyze it with either an existing dataset or an original study. Students create a poster and display their results in a setting that approximates an academic conference.
This project has students work in pairs explore the botany of Harvard Square. Students find a plant-related item to research and prepare a an abstract, a presentation, and a written report.
How does economic development affect democracy? This activity has students create visual diagrams for articles on the relationship between economic development and democracy and then pair up to teach the article to the rest of the class.
Assigned debates work well for weeks where several competing theoretical approaches are covered. This debate involves competing theories on approaches to explaining political attitudes.
This group discussion format can be used in a week that covers several big concepts, each of which can be discussed along a similar ("parallel") sequence of discussion questions. The concepts in this particular class are: Wisdom of crowds, Heuristic decision-making, Groupthink, and Cooperation.
