Pedagogical Partnership

The Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning and the Wurtele Center for Leadership offer the Pedagogical Partnerships Program during the spring semesters. We support faculty and staff teachers who work in close collaboration with student partners to strengthen pedagogy and enhance the course experience. This is a great opportunity to harness student feedback and partnership to meaningfully address some of the challenges we’re experiencing in our classrooms and to think deeply about equitable and inclusive course design, explore new pedagogical approaches, or incorporate new course content.

Faculty and staff teachers interested in pursuing a student pedagogical partnership should identify an intellectual project (a specific driving question, problem, or experiment) they would like to pursue with the help of a student partner to strengthen pedagogy and enhance the course experience. We are particularly interested in projects that actively engage student partners with students in your course.

In the past, faculty have worked with student partners to: 

• Tailor course content to needs of diverse learners
• Make class discussions more equitable and engaged through mapping and observation of student-to-student and student-to-faculty interactions
• Reimagine the framing and sequence of assignments to best prepare students for a final project
• Scaffold and fine-tune collaborative learning techniques, including informal group work and longer-term group projects
• Co-create feminist environments based in mutual trust, collaboration, collective care, and the ability to navigate conflict
• Develop new teaching resources that introduce complex technical tools to students 

To apply, a form needs to be filled out with partnership details (deadline usually in December before classes end and the form will be posted during the fall semester). For additional details of the expectations for faculty/staff teachers and their student partners, see the information below or contact the Sherrerd Center at sherrerdcenter@smith.edu. 

Faculty partner expectations

• Mentor student partners and help facilitate their reflection as they explore pedagogical practices
• Participate in the program kick-off lunch meeting during the first week of classes
• Meet with your student partner once a week and approve their time in Workday
• Join an optional mid-semester faculty partner check-in lunch
• Complete a final evaluation at the end of the semester and participate in a closing session during the last two week of spring classes.

Student partner expectations

• Attend Student Pedagogical Partner Orientation (sessions over Zoom before classes begin in the spring)
• Participate in the program kick-off lunch meeting during the first week of classes
• Meet with your faculty partner once a week
• Attend class and/or work together with your faculty partner on your pedagogical partnership project
• Attend four pedagogical leadership workshops with the Wurtele Center (lunch provided) from 12:15-1:30 pm on select Mondays during the spring semester
• Complete occasional readings or reflections to prepare for Wurtele Center workshops
• Dedicate six hours a week to partnership work (this includes attending class sessions and workshops with the Wurtele Center) 
• Complete a final evaluation at the end of the semester and participate in a closing session during the last two week of spring classes (date and time TBD)

The Sherrerd Center pays the student partners an hourly wage for their time (up to 6 hours per week), which faculty partners will approve in Workday.

Questions?

Please reach out to sherrerdcenter@smith.edu with questions. Priority for partnerships will be given to those who apply by the deadline and to those who are new to the program and/or have greater need for support.

As they prepared to teach their Spring 2022 course, ENV 327 Environmental Justice in an Urbanizing World, Efadul Huq and their student partner, Krystal Bagnaschi ’22, were curious about the ways in which observations of student-to-student and student-to-instructor interactions during class meetings might offer insights that could help Efad constructively modify discussion and group activity strategies for deeper engagement with the class content.

Krystal attended every class and mapped interactions through diagrams and took notes about recurring patterns of questions, where the conversations were pausing, and where they were getting into frictions that needed further addressing.

Both partners then wrote up their reflections (sometimes a few words/phrases or sometimes paragraphs) to prepare for their weekly meeting.

In those meetings, they would read through each others’ reflections and also use the map to identify challenges and opportunities. This would lead to new ideas; for example, they changed the order of assignments, they moved the class to a different room, they modified the time length of activities, and they selected new readings or videos in response to emerging conversations.

This process continued throughout the semester, allowing Efad, Krystal, and the students to continually refine their process together.

At the end of the semester, they created a zine of these interactions to share their “backstage” process of designing and adjusting pedagogical elements with the students in the course, which helped them see the ways in which their experiences helped to shape the evolution of their learning environment.