Recommendations: Structures

Slack

• Have an exit process for dropouts.

• Have a plan for the lifetime of the Slack community. Will it stay an HPL community forever, become an HGSE community, or end in July?

• Decide whether or not the Slack platform will have a set of rules and what these will be, or if students should be involved in deciding them. Additionally, decide whether or not faculty should join or moderate student-created groups in the Slack.

Harmonize

• Experiment with different types of discussion prompts and scales of discussions. (Do introductions work better in smaller discussion groups? Maybe students have the option to periodically return to smaller discussion groups for reflective activities or lower-pressure "journal" prompts.)

• Offer alternative discussion prompts where students can ask questions of classmates.

Enduring Learnings, Growth and the Future

• Create and curate enduring spaces where the stories of the community can be accessed. This might look like a course blog, website, or social media community to which students and faculty alike could contribute. Students could write about course topics, share about their careers, or describe their experience of being a part of the community. Teaching fellows, instructors, and designers could write about the experience of creating the course.

• If super members were put in charge of this course blog or website, they could look for people with unique experiences to interview, or contribute writing, poetry, or other artifacts of value.

• In general, find more opportunities for students to share out about what they themselves and what do; center course concepts to their own experience. Key concepts include stories, co-creation, centering student experience, professional identity, and collaboration.

• Create enduring opportunities for students to access and display work related to the HPL design project.

  • Hold on-campus events throughout the year giving students opportunities to showcase what they learned from HPL and how they have put it into practice.

  • Possibly create social media account, Instagram or Twitter account with semi-weekly links to these blog posts or orienting followers to student research/research in the broader Harvard educational community.