My implementation
The eleven practices mapped onto EPI 601, Fall 2026
This is the fellowship’s final-project chart in one place. It is a plan, not a record. EPI 601 runs for the first time in this form in Fall 2026, so every entry below is what is intended rather than what happened.
Where a practice has been run already, it was in EPI 501 (Fall 2025) or EPI 553 (Spring 2026), and those courses appear here as the source of the evidence I am designing against rather than as the site of implementation.
The course
EPI 601, General Topics in Epidemiologic Methods. Three credits, PhD level, Mondays 3:00 to 5:50, thirteen content sessions across a fourteen-week term. Previously taught by a colleague and being rebuilt around the fellowship material.
The enduring understanding the redesign is organized around:
Enduring understanding
Every epidemiologic study design involves trade-offs between internal and external validity, and recognizing those trade-offs is what separates a critical reader from a passive consumer of evidence.
The eleven practices
| Practice | Weeks | Used before the fellowship | |
|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | Mission, vision, values | 1 | No |
| A2 | Belonging story and strategies | 1, 2 | Yes, EPI 501 |
| A3 | Transparency about the discipline | 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 | No |
| E1 | Growth mindset and wise feedback | 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 | No |
| E2 | Formative assessment | 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 | Yes, EPI 501 and 553 |
| V1 | Active and experiential learning | 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 | Yes, EPI 501 |
| V2 | Collaborative learning and group work | 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 | No, adapted from EPI 553 |
| V3 | Chunking and simplifying | all 14 | No |
| S1 | Connecting content to student experience | 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 | No |
| S2 | Course policies | 1 | No |
| S3 | Reducing negative, increasing positive stress | all 14 | Yes, rubrics in EPI 501 |
Four of the eleven build on something already in place. Seven are new.
The two checked for every week, chunking and stress, are the two that describe how a session is shaped rather than something added to it. The two checked for week one only, mission and course policies, are the ones that are set in the syllabus and then hold.
What changes in the assessments
The redesign came out of running the existing exam backwards against the stated goals.
| Previously | Fall 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Exams, closed book and timed | 45% (10 + 25 + 10) | 30% (three at 10%) |
| Student-led reading discussion | 15% | 15% |
| Scaffolded study critiques | — | 15% |
| Oral presentation | 15% | 15% |
| Final paper | 25% | 25%, with a draft feedback cycle |
Exam weight falls by fifteen points and that weight moves to scaffolded critiques, which are formative lead-ups to the final paper rather than a separate strand. The final paper keeps its weight and gains a draft cycle so the wise-feedback sentence has somewhere to land. Exams stay closed book and timed, and grace days do not apply to them.
The pair-critique model
The final-project presentation was on one practice in detail, a structured pair critique adapted from the driver/navigator model used for R labs in EPI 553.
A lead critic identifies methodological strengths and weaknesses in the assigned article. A challenger pushes back with alternative interpretations. Pairs and roles re-randomize every session, the exchange is time-boxed to about twelve minutes inside a twenty-minute segment, and both students submit individual write-ups afterwards.
It is on this page rather than only under collaborative learning because it is the clearest case of one activity carrying several practices at once. It is active learning, it is cooperative learning with individual accountability, it models how the discipline actually argues, it normalizes disagreement, it is low-stakes practice before a graded critique, and rotating pairs build community across a small cohort.