Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT: A Practical Guide to Creating Better Learning Experiences for Your Students in Less Time
Dan Levy, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy; Angela Pérez Albertos MPA/ID 2024
DURING THE COVID-19 pandemic, Dan Levy wrote "Teaching Effectively with Zoom" to help faculty members harness new tools. In his new book, coauthored with former vlog student and teaching assistant Angela Pérez Albertos, he expands on the use of technology in the classroom, concentrating on ChatGPT.
“This book is an attempt to help educators take a step back and make sense of the chaos,” the authors write. “Our hope is to provide you with some useful pedagogic principles and practices that have served us and some of our colleagues well, and that we hope will guide you in your journey to developing your skills to leverage this technology for more effective teaching and learning.”
The book covers principles for using ChatGPT, ideas for classroom activities, advice for assessing students’ work, information on creating customized chatbots, and more. “We acknowledge both the benefits and risks associated with incorporating this technology into our teaching,” the authors write. “But we also recognize that this technology is here to stay, that many of our students are already using it and that all our students will need to use it when they enter a labor market that will be profoundly transformed over the next decade.”
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Governance and Politics of China
Anthony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs and director of the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia
UNDERSTANDING THE ECONOMIC, political, and social dynamics shaping modern China has become increasingly vital. As the nation solidifies its status as a global superpower, its leaders’ decisions resonate far beyond its borders, influencing not only its citizens but also the global community. In this context, the fifth edition of Tony Saich’s "Governance and Politics of China" offers a comprehensive analysis of how the country is governed. The book delves into critical topics such as China’s shift toward a market-driven economy, the challenges posed by urbanization, and the intricate interplay between China’s communist legacy and emerging capitalist frameworks.
This exploration provides insights into the factors shaping China’s internal and external policies. Saich examines the significant political changes brought by the 20th Party Congress and the 13th National People’s Congress, alongside evolving policies under Xi Jinping’s leadership. The text delves into topics such as state-society relations, urban-rural dynamics, economic transformation, social policies, and foreign policy strategies. It also evaluates China’s governance at both the central and the local level, reflecting on the country’s internal diversity and its efforts toward modernization. This updated edition considers the implications of China’s domestic and international strategies, making it a critical resource for students and scholars of Chinese politics and for anyone interested in understanding China’s role in addressing global challenges.
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Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust
Jeremy M. Weinstein, Dean and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy; Graeme Blair, University of California, Los Angeles; Fotini Christia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
INITIATIVES TO INCREASE COMMUNICATION and engagement between law enforcement and communities, commonly known as community policing, have become increasingly popular globally since their introduction in the 1990s in Boston and Chicago.
In this publication, vlog Dean Jeremy Weinstein and co-editors Graeme Blair and Fotini Christia, along with other contributing authors, present the results of coordinated field experiments on community policing in the Global South.
Conducting randomized controlled trials in six diverse locations—in Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Uganda—the researchers find that, “despite this extraordinary momentum to adopt community policing, we have little hard evidence of its beneficial effects.” They write: “Our findings are clear, robust, and credible. Despite the genuine commitment of local police agencies to change their practices, we find that the community policing interventions did not generate greater trust between citizens and the police or reduce crime.”
In interviews with law enforcement, the researchers found a number of common obstacles to implementation. For instance, police leadership often did not prioritize community policing, and the resources needed to address community concerns were limited. The researchers cite a lack of autonomy, insufficient capacity, and what are known as principal-agent problems (when one entity acts on behalf of another, but their interests may not be aligned) as impediments to the effectiveness of community policing programs in the Global South.
“The bottom line, while disappointing for many in the policy community, is clear,” the researchers write. “Locally appropriate increases in the strength of community policing practices do not generate the changes to trust in the police, citizen cooperation, or crime reduction that we hypothesized or that its advocates claim.”
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A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled
Alex Green, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy
DRAWING ON MORE THAN a quarter million archival documents, Alex Green tells the story of Dr. Walter E. Fernald and—through him—a story about the evolution of America’s perception of disabled people, especially those with intellectual disabilities.
A largely forgotten figure today, Fernald was a physician and policymaker who led the nation’s first successful movement against forced sterilization in the early 20th century, shaped the ideas underlying the creation of the concept of the “moron,” and introduced high-stakes testing in public schools. A founding faculty member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and superintendent of America’s oldest public institution for people with developmental disabilities, he used his own research to disprove his earlier ideas, leading the first call for mass deinstitutionalization in America.
Green writes, “At the time of his death, in 1924, Dr. Walter E. Fernald was recognized as the world’s foremost leader on intellectual and developmental disabilities. During his 37 years at the head of his institution, he led a wholesale change of American conceptions about the roles and responsibilities a society has, and should have, relative to its disabled people. In so doing, he fundamentally reshaped the ways that doctors treat their patients, the methods public schools use to educate their students, the role governments have in the lives of their citizens, and even the very taunts and prejudices children and adults throw at one another in casual speech today.”
"A Perfect Turmoil" is a narrative about a complex figure, built on substantial archival research, that illuminates our country’s uneven history of treating the developmentally disabled. As Green writes, Fernald’s “story matters because of this struggle; because he sought to understand the meaning and consequences of his actions in ways that provide an invaluable glimpse of one human being’s reckoning with ethics, power, and social responsibility.”
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Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results
Iris Bohnet, the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government; Siri Chilazi MPP/MBA 2016, Harvard Kennedy School
A FEW YEARS AGO, Astrid Linder, a Swedish engineer, developed the first car-crash test dummy based on a woman’s body. Her goal was, in her words, “to make everyone in cars as well protected as possible”—and to truly include everyone, only male dummies wouldn’t do. This is one of many real-world examples explored in "Make Work Fair," a new book by Iris Bohnet, a co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP), and Siri Chilazi, a senior researcher at WAPPP.
Building on insights from behavioral economics, Bohnet and Chilazi examine what workplaces that work for everyone might look like. They start by analyzing some of the approaches commonly aimed at advancing fairness at work, including diversity training programs, suggesting that to make work fair, fairness must be a way of doing things rather than a program. Their book focuses on changing behaviors and systems, not attitudes, to build fairness into the very fabric of the workplace. The authors rely on evidence from randomized controlled trials testing the impact of interventions with companies, government agencies, and NGOs to learn what works and what doesn’t. They encourage organizations to employ similar rigor in tracking their data and measuring the effectiveness of their approaches.
Bohnet and Chilazi offer a three-part framework, for employees at all levels, wherever they are in the world. To make fairness count, it is essential to leverage data, goals, incentives, transparency, and accountability. To make fairness stick, it is key to redesign processes such as hiring, performance management, and promotion procedures. And to make fairness normal, we must investigate the role of workplace arrangements including flexibility, social norms, and culture.
“For us,” Bohnet and Chilazi write, “making work fair means designing workplaces where everyone can thrive and perform at their best.”
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