Teaching at Pitt: How are you doing? Higher Ed through the lens of relationships

By LIZETTE MUÑOZ ROJAS

For quite a few years, and more deliberately since the pandemic, I open my emails by asking students, faculty and fellow staff members alike a simple question: How are you? Most folks might see this as a rhetorical question, one that is offered as a standard greeting, not meant or even expected to be answered directly. This adds more meaning to the rare response that includes a candid glimpse into the start of the day of the recipient, and even more value to those who follow up with a sincere, and you? A connection has been established.

In “Relationship Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College,” authors Peter Felten and Leo Lambert discuss the power of “simple, inexpensive, scalable and humane” practices such as genuinely asking a fellow academic community member how they are doing. Felten and Lambert found that students across multiple U.S. higher ed institutions valued this small act, particularly if followed by intent listening.

Throughout their book, the authors direct our attention to a key driver of student success in U.S. higher ed: human relationships. Their focus supplements well-known and documented research about the impact of active learning, authentic assessments or goal-oriented educational technology, among other factors.

Felten and Lambert’s qualitative research design involved campus visits to 16 different higher education institutions, ranging from large research universities like Pitt to community colleges to comprehensive public institutions and beyond. During those visits, the researchers spoke with 385 students, faculty and staff. Up to 53% of their research participants were undergraduate students.

The analysis of qualitative data obtained through interviews and focus groups helped these scholars identify emergent themes connected to the effects of a relationship-rich education. The book is full of testimonials and quotations that illustrate the many ways in which human connection plays a key role in academia. More importantly, the authors argue that while individual efforts have changed students’ lives for the better, these encounters should not occur by happenstance or only for those who already feel at ease in our midst. Felton and Lambert invite and challenge us to center relationships through reimagining our institution’s culture and structure.

“Relationship Rich Education” presents us with “visions of the possible” through an exploration of successful practices, policies, and priorities brought to life by individuals and institutions across the U.S. Furthermore, these practices, policies and priorities are in direct alignment with four relationship-rich principles that emerged from Felten and Lambert’s analysis. These principles posit that every student must:

experience genuine welcome and deep care,
be inspired to learn,
develop a web of significant relationships, and
explore questions of meaning and purpose.

Pitt’s Teaching Center’s ethos is strongly guided by centering human connections. Through many of our programs, initiatives and events, we consistently generate scalable practices that foster student-student, student-faculty and student-staff relationships guided by the four principles outlined above. Moreover, Teaching Center-led opportunities offer Pitt community members the chance to connect with folks with whom they might not share similar experiences, disciplines or interests other than a passion to enhance our students’ learning experiences. What are some examples of relationship-rich practices spearheaded by the Teaching Center?

Table of Contents

Student-student relationships

Felten and Lambert are aware that continuing generation students, legacy students and those who are extroverted and socially skilled might be more advantageously positioned to benefit from a relationship-rich education. Additional barriers to positive student-student interactions are fueled by anxiety about group work, low perceived value of peer discussion, or concerns about facing peers who “dominate” the interaction. Furthermore, the authors recognize that some students may need to be coached and encouraged to build these relationships, and propose that meaningful human relationships in one’s educational journey should be not only an option but “inescapable.”

When contending with these considerations, top-down efforts to organize effective student-student dynamics are crucial. In their overview of the literature, Felten and Lambert found that peer-to-peer learning is maximized when students know that: a) the work that is expected from them is challenging enough that peer support will play a part in their success (i.e., there is positive interdependence), and b) the assessment of their efforts will discourage social loafing (i.e., there is individual accountability). Adding a peer review-based formative assessment as a required step of a high-stakes assignment ensures that we don’t leave the option of students connecting with each other to chance.

Peer review assignments are paramount in the process of generating structured opportunities for students to connect in the context of our classrooms, be they brick-and-mortar or virtual. The University Teaching Practicum (FACDEV 2200) course for graduate students offered by the Teaching Center was designed with peer review opportunities at the heart of its coursework. While FACDEV 2200 is not the only foundational teaching program offered by the Teaching Center, it is the only one that follows a semester-long, cohort-based course design.

FACDEV 2200 students work on compiling teaching instruments of their own design in a marketable teaching portfolio to submit as they enter the job market. By purposefully including peer reviews as a required step in the scaffolded creation of their teaching portfolios, with feedback provided online via Canvas, as well as directly, inside and outside of the classroom, FACDEV 2200’s design purposefully supports the development of a web of significant relationships.

Student-faculty relationships

Felten and Lambert’s work relies on five decades of research on the centrality of student-faculty relationships, widely understood as catalysts for learning, belonging, and persistence. The rich tapestry of anecdotes about lives changed for the better — even lives saved — based on a reassuring conversation with a faculty member or a graduate advisor are a reminder of the major role that Pitt’s faculty members play in our community.

Offering feedback and grading is a crucial process that could further or hinder the student-faculty connection. Grading can be a fraught exercise, and having the opportunity to clarify and offer guidance to individual students about how their work meets expectations (or doesn’t) is not a scalable practice for instructors with many competing priorities and/or large classes.

A few strategies such as offering improvement-oriented feedback through rubrics and comment libraries, or tempering direct, straightforward suggestions with the addition of a short voice comment, can strengthen a message of relentless welcome delivered through class-wide interactions. Additionally, flexible grading schemes which allow for dropping the lowest grade within an assignment group, can clearly communicate to students that challenges and setbacks are normal when learning.

The Teaching Center’s Education Software Consulting unit organizes an end-of-term grading gathering for all Pitt instructors. At this event, faculty and grad instructors can build community with one another and experience welcome and care, partaking in games, crafts, snacks and chair massages. Participants are offered a space to collectively focus on final grading with on-the-spot assistance to manage their Canvas gradebook, in a way that more tangibly aligns with a course design that allows students to experience genuine welcome and deep care.

Student-staff relationships

According to Felten and Lambert, relationships don’t need to fit the model of long-term, one-on-one academic mentoring to have a meaningful impact. In fact, at a large research university such as Pitt, with a 14:1 ratio of students to instructors, the “ideal” mentoring dynamic might even be unattainable. The authors highlight the term “just-in-time mentoring,” used to describe interactions with academic community members that don’t necessarily need to last three or four years to successfully position students on their way to professional and personal development.

Mentors of the moment are forged in spaces in which a culture of meaningful interactions is the norm. Mentoring conversations are described as exchanges that create space for students to be heard and be human. Mentoring conversations also include “nitty-gritty” guidance and knowledge, and include “warm handoffs” that facilitate widening a student’s connections. These types of conversations are key in low moments of students’ lives.

Finally, mentoring conversations leave legacies. The Teaching Center’s Open Lab has successfully cultivated an ecosystem in which mentoring conversations between students and staff members take place regularly and year-round.

Open Lab is a makerspace located at the Hillman Library that provides an encouraging environment for students to explore learning through making. Open Lab’s mission of providing the support and resources needed for Pitt community members to confidently incorporate emerging technologies into their teaching and learning has allowed several cohorts of students to find their calling.

At Open Lab, Teaching Center staff engage students in truly invaluable mentoring conversations. As a result, students are offered specialized roles that respond to their needs and interests, and that serve the purpose of building marketable skills that have widened their professional horizons. Through mentorship, students and staff affiliated with Open Lab explore questions of meaning and purpose.

“Relationship Rich Education” is — above all — an invitation to consider how our policies and practices would look like if we deliberately used the lens of relationships to gauge their impact. Felten and Lambert’s research offers us glimpses of the possible by helping us identify where to find spaces in which students, faculty, and staff see each other, listen to each other, encourage each other, and challenge each other. At Pitt’s Teaching Center, we are proud to serve that very purpose through the many services and programs we develop so that we are all inspired to learn. We hope to see you around and will be sure to greet you with a genuine “How are you doing?”

Lizette Muñoz Rojas is a senior teaching consultant in the University Center for Teaching and Learning and the program manager for the Graduate Student Teaching Initiative.

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