Each year, GSAS joins with the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning to recognize the pedagogical powers of graduate students. These five TFs, selected from a long list of students nominated by departments, are chosen as winners of the Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching. The award includes a $1,000 prize from a gift given by David G. Nathan ’51, MD ’55, the Robert A. Stranahan Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and his wife Jean Louise Friedman Nathan. Meet the 2010 winners, who were honored at a ceremony at the end of the spring term.

Kari Lock

Kari Lock (pictured above), a fourth-year student in the Department of Statistics, “has a rare combination of clarity and organizational skills, a compelling presence, a desire to know her students as individuals, and an infectious enthusiasm for statistics.” So said three of the department’s senior leaders, Professors Xiou-Li Meng, Joseph Blitzstein, and Carl Morris, as they detailed Lock’s accomplishments in their nomination letter.

Lock is not just well regarded in the department, the three stated; she has become, at a remarkably early stage, a sought-after speaker, teacher, and trainer by institutions including Harvard’s Bok Center, the American Statistical Association, the National Science Foundation, and conferences on statistics and pedagogy around the world.

Lock was instrumental in designing an interactive clicker system for introductory statistics courses, a technology that has resulted in excellent attendance and lively discussion. She’s also been heavily involved in course design at the introductory level, helping to develop (with Xiou-Li Meng) first Stat 105 and now its descendent, the General Education course EM 16. Undergraduate education is in her genes, she says: she’s writing an introductory statistics text with her parents, who both teach undergraduate math and stats, and two brothers, who both also study statistics.

Bhart-Anjan Bhullar

As a second-year student and a teaching fellow in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology’s “Life Sciences 2” class last fall, Bhart-Anjan Bhullar (right) was accessible to his students in ways that far surpassed the ordinary. He held review sessions for lab every weekend, often on both days, lasting several hours. He made sure every student was accommodated at these sessions, even over break, even if they came from other sections. And he was always on call, having given students his cell phone number and his Gmail address for online chatting.

Professor George Lauder wrote in his nomination that Bhullar “showed students several fine dissection techniques that we don’t normally teach” and “used some unorthodox sequences of dissection that weren’t in the lab manual . . . and got exceptional results.”

Bhullar also customized each lecture during the pre-lab, Lauder writes, filling in gaps, providing links to supplementary literature and photos, and helping students see the medical applications and the evolutionary history that the original lab plan hadn’t detailed. “In the past ten years, I have never had a TF for any class receive the level of positive comments that we received about Anjan,” Lauder says.

Christopher Lewis

As a fifth-year student in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Christopher Lewis (left) has a near-native proficiency in Portuguese that allows him to teach everything from introductory classes to the writing-intensive “bridge courses” that TAs and TFs are rarely assigned to teach. That range represents not just an impressive spectrum of knowledge, says Clemence Jouet-Pastre, the senior preceptor in Portuguese, but also of technique, since the skills required are so different.

His pedagogical and mentoring skills are exceptional, but what truly distinguishes Lewis is his character, wrote Jouet-Pastre in her nomination. “His independence, professionalism, and work ethic are unsurpassed,” she said, recalling the ten-page reference handout he composed to explain the intricacies of the Portuguese subjunctive mode, for which textbook resources are scarce.
Students praise his good humor, enthusiasm, compassion, and stimulating teaching style. But Lewis hasn’t allowed kindness to compromise his expectations. As one student wrote, “I appreciate Chris’s frank responses. It was refreshing to have a teacher who viewed my work relative to my past performance and wasn’t afraid to let me know if I did or didn’t measure up to that standard.”

Chris Barrett

A fifth-year student in the department of English, Chris Barrett (right) is a scholar and teacher of astonishing energy, intensity, charisma, and warmth, wrote Professor Stephen Greenblatt, her primary mentor, in his nomination letter.

Whether convening an informal seminar for graduate students to meet a visiting professor, chairing the department’s Renaissance colloquium, serving as graduate student assistant to the Arts Task Force, or organizing a conference marking the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton, Barrett is thoughtful in her preparation, precise in her organization, and creative in her execution.

Greenblatt calls her a brilliant lecturer who “held my large undergraduate lecture course spellbound with a daring, original, and utterly engaging lecture on Shakespeare’s Pericles, one of the least likely plays on which to score a pedagogical triumph.” With a fine sense of humor and innovative pedagogical techniques, she elicits eager responses during section and has the ability to turn those responses into “a persuasive intellectual narrative.”

Meg Rithmire

Meg Rithmire (left), a G7 in the department of Government, served for two years as head teaching fellow for the single most important course in the department’s undergraduate concentration, the new Gov 97 sophomore tutorial. As the organizer and connector among the tutors and with the faculty, she has proven to be a great communicator, a logistical master, an intellectual and pedagogical leader, and a consistently upbeat and enthusiastic colleague, her department reported in its nomination materials.

A full partner with course heads Nancy Rosenblum and Timothy Colton in 2009 and Rosenblum and Daniel Ziblatt in 2010, Meg helped to conceptualize the course and revise the curriculum based on student and instructor experience. To do so, she read widely in literature outside of her field and mined the texts for their intellectual merit and pedagogical utility. In 2010, in conjunction with the Harvard Writing Program, she also organized and ran several well-attended, course-wide writing workshops.

Meg’s “centrality to the major reform of the department’s introductory tutorial” and her commitment to the program as a whole “will have long-term benefits even after she moves on,” wrote Professor Rosenblum.