4 Harvard professors participate in teaching forum

Four professors from Harvard University shared their advanced teaching methods and ideas with Chinese teachers at the BFSU-Harvard Symposium on "teaching for the future", held over the weekend.

Dozens of teachers from Beijing Normal University, Wuhan University, Shandong University, among others, attend the symposium, which was organized by Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Christopher Marquis, one of the four professors who is engaged in teaching and research on how business can have a positive effect on society, said he was glad to be at the Chinese university to share what he had learned and acquired at Harvard with the Chinese teachers.

"I personally found that teaching has really helped me advance my research and my learning more generally," he said at the opening ceremony of the symposium, adding that he did a lot of teaching because there's nothing more difficult than to specialize an academic topic and translate it for young students at the undergraduate, graduate and MBA levels.

During the two-days symposium, Marquis shared his experience on introducing case studies in teaching. He also talked about a variety of topics such as the innovation of teaching, the responsibility of students, and how to connect research and practice.

The other three Harvard professors — Dustin Tingley, Arthur Spirling and Tina Blythe — gave speeches on active learning, engaged learning and effective teaching strategies.

Han Zhen, chairman of the university council of BFSU, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University 12 years ago and praised Harvard as a "marvelous university".

He said BFSU is a university where teachers have rich teaching experience and good teaching tradition, and the arrival of the Harvard professors provided a good opportunity for teachers at BFSU to improve teaching.

Sun Youzhong, vice-president of BFSU, said the symposium was organized jointly by BFSU and Harvard for the purpose of promoting teacher development and teaching reform, and the theme of the symposium was "Teaching for the Future".

It means preparing students to meet the challenges of the future, enabling them to remain curious about the world, thinking critically to solve problems, and exploring new fields of knowledge. For this purpose of teaching for the future, teachers should first teach themselves for the future, he said.

"The four Harvard professor we invited are great examples of teaching for the future, and I suggest we give reflection on how we did our classroom teaching, and try to adapt their methods to our courses in the Chinese contexts," he said.

"Everyone of us will be a better teacher by learning from and internalizing the best experiences of the best teachers of the best university of the world."