Pedagogical Partnership

How Does It Work?

To develop the capacity to be effective faculty partners, professors wishing to participate in the program first take a two-day summer institute on engaging students as partners in teaching and learning. Faculty partners then choose the course that they would like to work on with a student partner. During the semester, student partners attend one class per week and take observation notes. Faculty partners may or may not ask their student partners to focus on particular aspects of their teaching. Student and faculty pairs meet once a week to affirm what is going well and discuss what might be adjusted or improved. To develop their theories of and vocabularies for teaching and learning, students meet weekly with one another and Professor Al Rudnitksy in a two-credit course titled IDP210: The Pedagogy of Student-Faculty Partnership.

Students are paid an hourly wage for their work, and faculty members receive a stipend for participating in the summer institute. The program is funded from 2016–19 by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Who Pairs with Whom?

Student partners may or may not be in the same field as their faculty partners. The choice depends on the partners available and their goals. In most cases, field match doesn’t matter since the focus is on teaching practice—not course content. The Sherrerd Center manages the application and pairing process.

How Is It Going?

This combination of long-term learning and exchange, based on principles of respect, reciprocity and shared responsibility (Cook-Sather et al., 2014), have yielded early signs of success since the program’s inception in 2016. Student partners report feeling more engaged in their own learning and more empowered as participants in the process of teaching and learning at Smith. Faculty partners testify that their partners have given them entirely new perspectives on their teaching. Together, student-faculty pairs collaborate to make sure that all students are included and engaged.

What Is the Wider Context?

Student-faculty pedagogical partnerships are increasingly a focus of attention in both scholarship and practice. For instance, in a widely cited report, Healey, Flint, and Harrington (2014) wrote that engaging students and faculty effectively as partners in learning and teaching “is arguably one of the most important issues facing higher education in the 21st century” (p. 7), and they provide a wide range of examples of the proliferation of such partnerships. Likewise, a recent issue of the International Journal for Academic Development, titled “Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: Implications for academic development," offers both arguments for and examples of student-faculty partnership projects in Australia, Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The McMaster Institute for Innovation and Enhancement in Teaching and Learning organized the first International Summer Institute on Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, which took place in early May 2016, and is planning another institute for May 2017. A grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation includes funds to support Smith College in joining Lafayette, Lewis & Clark, Oberlin, Reed, and Ursinus Colleges in developing a student-faculty partnership program based on the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program.

How Do I Learn More?

To learn more about pedagogical partnership in general, read Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching: A Guide for Faculty by Alison Cook-Sather, Catherine Bovill and Peter Felten. To learn more about Smith’s program, contact the director of the Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning, Floyd Cheung.

Spring 2019

Past Partners