Word: curricular
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Provide resources for curricular improvement to departments and concentrations. Individual course heads are not the only ones who must rise to the occasion. Departmental chairs and directors of undergraduate and graduate study face even more daunting challenges, for they must orchestrate collegial efforts to improve course offerings and advising, enhance training in basic skills, and sharpen the preparation of teaching fellows. Rather than pepper departments with disconnected demands from separate University Hall offices, FAS must ensure that department leaders have real-time information and flexible resources. Starting next year, FAS should give multi-year grants to allow departments to plan...
Three years from now, how will we know if curricular reform is working? What signs will indicate that improved courses and advising are enriching the undergraduate academic experience? It is time to ask this question--to lay down criteria by which we can measure and move toward success—even though more hours of faculty debate will unfold before the last vote on the new system of General Education is tallied in a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences...
Finally, make better training and more creative deployment of graduate teaching fellows a central part of curricular reform. Graduate student teachers are as vital to great research universities as medical interns are to flagship hospitals. At Harvard, we fund graduate education in part through teaching fellowships and offer excellent teacher training to our PhDs. But teaching fellowships have been tied, in a cookie-cutter fashion, to lecture-course sections enrolling 15 to 18 undergraduates apiece. Faculty are often loath to try new course formats for fear of not employing enough TFs; and graduate students do not develop a full range...
...Harvard should have a January term. But while such an inter-semester mini-term might be superficially appealing, we doubt that it could succeed in practice and hope the University does not try to implement a J-Term. In March 2004, the Committee on Calendar Reform, one of the curricular review committees, proposed a “4-1-4” schedule to align Harvard with most other colleges: The school year would start immediately after Labor Day and final exams would be given prior to winter recess in December. Before the four months of spring semester...
This problem goes far beyond the realm of the curricular review. It is the product of an irony-soaked campus culture that all too often spurns simple, earnest patriotism in favor of suave, detached cosmopolitanism...