The Grammar of a Global Health Section
Where exactly does one start with designing a global health lesson plan? At a recent Graduate Teaching Studio, graduate students from the Harvard Chan School dove into the fundamentals of creating an interactive session that promotes engagement and critical thinking.
Terry Aladjem, GHELI’s Senior Scholar-In-Residence, opened the studio with an introduction to Bloom’s Taxonomy, a building block for crafting concise and meaningful goals in active learning classrooms. To demystify the lesson planning process further, Elizabeth Hentschel—GHELI’s Bok Pedagogy Fellow—introduced the “grammar of section,” a tool from the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning that breaks down the parts of planning a section: building rapport, framing the lesson, querying prior knowledge, instruction, application, and reflection.
Selecting a topic relevant to their field, ranging from LGBTQ+ health to global TB trends, workshop participants identified goals and ideas for actualizing each dimension in the classroom. Participants outlined their lesson goals in one hands-on activity and passed their outlines to different participants to crowdsource novel approaches for bringing those goals to life.
GHELI’s monthly teaching studios for graduate students provide an opportunity to develop critical skills as population health educators. Workshops are aimed at graduate students serving as teaching fellows for global health and public health courses across the University. In the coming months, our Teaching and Learning Team will be sharing creative ways for educators to access resources from the Graduate Teaching Studios through GHELI’s digital repository. Stay tuned!