Over the last 20 years we have seen a move toward increased and intentional student engagement in the college classroom, often in the form of active learning, student choice, and responsiveness to their learning and life needs. While these are good and necessary moves, they still make students the recipients of an instructor’s choices rather than collaborators in cultivating what the classroom experience should be. 

To truly empower students to shape the larger work of teaching and learning, colleges and universities across the U.S. and beyond have established student partner programs within their teaching and learning centers, often called Pedagogical Partners. Largely popularized by the 2014 book Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching (Cook-Sather, Bovill, & Felten), Pedagogical Partnerships bring together faculty and students to collaboratively enhance the teaching and learning experience. More than simply gathering student input, these partnerships assert “a pedagogy of mutual engagement [through] reflection and sustained dialogue, inquiry, and collaboration” (Thiessen, 2010). Mutuality and shared responsibility is at the heart of Pedagogical Partners, where both faculty and students agree to learn more about teaching and learning from one another. 

In its second year as of this writing, CETL’s own Pedagogical Partners program invites both faculty and students to join in this joint venture. Faculty can sign up to be paired with a student to begin a three-part dialogue, observation, and feedback process driven by the student and faculty involved.

Why Students as Pedagogical Partners

With the core principles of the program set, it helps to know what the partnership process looks like, what you can expect and--in the spirit of mutuality--what you stand to both give and receive.

Student Perspectives Beyond Your Students

We benefit from gathering our students’ feedback, especially before the end of the semester’s formal feedback surveys (i.e., course evaluations), but that feedback will always be formed by the power dynamics involved in the context of your classroom. A Student Partner not only provides feedback as a student outside of your class, but often outside of your discipline, offering a fresh, different perspective still centered on the student experience. 

Informed Student Insights

Before stepping into a classroom and engaging in conversation with faculty in a formal capacity, Student Partners receive training from the CETL staff and student leaders on core teaching and learning principles, particularly related to higher education. They practice using a validated observation protocol to inform their perceptions and structure their feedback. Undergirding these competencies, they learn to engage in dialogue to build mutual understanding and curiosity in a way that respects the context of each professor and classroom. Most of all, they respect that their work with any professor is confidential.

Generative Ideas Through Sustained Dialogue

More than filling out a form or checklist, the process centers around dialogue and conversation. Before and after a classroom observation, faculty and students engage in a conversation about goals, issues, questions, and ideas. This partnership can continue as ideas grow and you want to work off continual feedback, either through additional student meetings or working with a CETL Faculty Fellow or staff.

Flexible Feedback, For Your Needs and Your Use Only

This program is for student and faculty engagement, intended only to be a formative opportunity for insight, growth, and understanding. Any feedback provided remains strictly confidential, so it will not be used for evaluative purposes outside of participation in the program.

The baseline format for faculty-student partnering consists of three parts: pre-observation conversation, classroom observation, and post-observation conversation. Nevertheless, this essential structure can be customized to provide insight into an asynchronous course, review an assignment description, or look over a syllabus. 

Faculty and Student Experiences

Coming from both faculty and students, we find in these quotes the same spirit of mutual benefit and growth, with each party understanding the unique contribution they have to make to each partnership and the larger partnership each classroom requires.

From a faculty partner:

“As a new faculty here, I found this process very helpful, allowing me to reflect deeply on my values and practices. I have some concrete ideas for future courses given this experience… [The student partner] was just such a phenomenal partner and observer for my class. ... I appreciated her eye to the small moments that matter and her connections to how students might experience the complex social interactions in the classroom… her dispositions to asset-based observations and a human-centered approach to students as full people was very much appreciated!”

From student partners:

“Throughout my time working with the Pedagogical Partnerships, I have formed great relationships with my fellow classmates, as well as professors. It has been extremely gratifying to work collaboratively with professors to improve their ability to positively impact students in their classrooms with well-designed, engaging pedagogical practices.” 

“Being part of the Pedagogical Partnership program has been incredibly rewarding. I have been able to explore more of Oakland University’s campus and interact with professors who I otherwise would not in my degree plan. Seeing the intentionality behind certain decisions instructors make, and how it translates to the classroom, has been my favorite part.”

References and Resources

Students as Partners CETL webpage
Faculty Interest Form, and Student Interest Form
Inside CETL's Pedagogical Partnership: Enhancing Student Engagement at OaklandU

The work was largely republished as an open-access book: Pedagogical Partnerships: A How-To Guide for Faculty, Students, and Academic Developers in Higher Education (Cook-Sather, Bahti, & Ntem,  2019). For more than 15 years the journal Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education has disseminated the outcomes and possibilities of these partnership programs, a few key examples highlighted by leading voice Alison Cook-Sather.

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