I'm writing this while on the way home from a two-day visit to the University of Virginia. I'm on staff at the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence, and I was "on Grounds" (as they say) for a CTE retreat. The retreat focused on ways that our center might partner more with students in our work supporting teaching and learning at the university. Our special guest was Alison Cook-Sather, who is an international expert in faculty-student pedagogical partnerships. I only knew Alison from her writing, and I was happy to learn that she's an incredibly thoughtful facilitator of professional development workshops. My CTE colleagues and I are leaving the retreat with lots of ideas for ways to integrate students and student voices into our various programs and projects.

The retreat got me thinking about the faculty-student partners I've interviewed on the Intentional Teaching podcast over the years. These partnerships have come in a variety of flavors, but all involve some version of the definition of pedagogical partnership that Cook-Sather uses:

That definition is from the 2014 book Engaging Students as Partners in Teaching and Learning: A Guide for Faculty by Cook-Sather, Catherine Bovill, and Peter Felten. The book emphasis three key principles in pedagogical partnerships: respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility.

This edition of the newsletter features links to and brief descriptions of the Intentional Teaching episodes about students as partners. Note that the labels I've given these episodes (students as partners, learning assistants, and so on) emphasize the role of students in these partnerships, but each of the episodes also explores the role of faculty and staff in these partnerships. If you'd like to get a sense of the complexities of naming this kind of teaching and learning activity, see the 2018 article "What We Talk about When We Talk about Students as Partners" by Cook-Sather, Kelly E. Matthews, Anita Ntem, and Sandra Leathwick, in International Journal for Students as Partners.

What kinds of pedagogical partnerships haven't been covered on Intentional Teaching? One version at the top of my list is Supplemental Instruction (SI), in which students who have taken a course before return to provide outside-of-class support for students currently in the course. As with Learning Assistants and some other ways of including students in the teaching team for a course, SI isn't always implemented as a partnership, but it certainly can be. I'm hoping to interview a faculty-student pair who lean into SI in this way, so if that's you, please reach out.

I'm also curious to know if anyone reading this has taken a students-as-partners approach to the work of making teaching more accessible to students with disabilities or learning differences or neurodivergent students. My CTE colleague Luke Rosenberger is heading up our center's work supporting digital accessibility, and he's very interested in involving students as partners in that work through a student advisory board and other means. If that resonates with something you're doing on your campus, please reach out.

Finally, I'll note that if you're familiar with my work, you might see some parallels between students as partners and the "students as producers" approach to course design we took at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. These are different approaches, but both owe at least a little inspiration from the late Mike Neary, who argued that students shouldn't be the object of education (someone whom is acted upon) but rather the subject (someone who acts with agency). I heard Neary speak at a conference in Ireland many years ago, and that talk continues to shape how I think of the possibilities for teaching and learning in higher education.

Students as Partners

Thanks to a chance encounter at a fireworks show at a conference in 2023, I learned that the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University had recently launched a very popular Students as Partners program. In the program, faculty are paired with thoughtful students who provide input and feedback into the faculty member's teaching and course design. The program benefits the student partners, the faculty partners, and the students in the faculty partners' courses.

​In this episode of the podcast, I talk with two people who know the Embry-Riddle program well: Aimee Fleming, associate director for the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, or CTLE, at Embry-Riddle, and Maren Rice, student partner for the CTLE. We had a great conversation about the Students as Partners program, how it started, how it works, and what benefits it brings to all involved.

Learning Assistants

In a Learning Assistants program, students who did well in a course in the past are invited to come back to attend class and help current students learn the course material, typically by helping to facilitate active learning instruction in the classroom. I knew these programs could be effective from my time at Vanderbilt University, where my teaching center colleague Cynthia Brame worked with a group of STEM faculty to pilot and implement a robust Learning Assistants program.

At a conference (maybe the same one with the fireworks?) I happened to sit at a table next to Katie Johnson, associate professor of mathematics at Florida Gulf Coast University. I learned that not only did Katie lead a Learning Assistants program at her institution, but also that she was actively involved in the Learning Assistant Alliance, an international group of educators involved with LA programs. In this episode of the podcast, I talk with Katie and one of her experienced LAs, Katarya Johnson-Williams, about their experiences in the program. We talked about the Learning Assistants model, the impact this kind of program can have on faculty and students, and advice for instructors who are interested in starting up an LA program in their department or on their campus.

AI Teaching Fellows

Christopher McVey is a master lecturer in the writing program at Boston University. Neeza Singh was a senior at BU majoring in data science. (She is now graduated.) In 2024, the two were partnered through the BU writing program's AI Affiliate Fellowship program, giving Neeza a role in Christopher's class supporting both Christopher and his students in responsible and effective use of generative AI in writing.

​On this episode of the podcast, I talk with Chris and Neeza about this innovative, AI-focused, students-as-partners program. They share about Neeza's role in Chris' writing course, how her work as an AI affiliate benefitted both Chris and his students, and the potential for this kind of program to work in other disciplines. Chris and Neeza have lots to say about the role of AI in learning and about the value of faculty-student pedagogical partnerships.

Writing with Students

I didn't think of this episode of the podcast as about students as partners until I was preparing this newsletter. Earlier this year, I interviewed Dan Levy and Angela Pérez Albertos about their book Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT. Dan is a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Angela was first a student in Dan’s class, then a teaching assistant working with Dan, then a co-author with Dan on this book. (She's now head of U.S. strategy at Innovamat, a global educational organization focusing on math learning.)

As I was preparing for this week's CTE retreat by reading some materials that Alison Cook-Sather and my CTE colleague Anna Santucci gathered for us, I was struck by (a) what a prolific writer Cook-Sather is and (b) how often she writers with her student partners as co-authors. Writing with students is a common practice in the world of students as partners, and this interview with Dan and Angela fits nicely into that tradition. In the episode, Dan and Angela talk about their partnership and how they integrated their different perspectives and experiences with AI in their book.

Thanks for reading!

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