Faculty members often design and revise courses with limited direct feedback from students. In this episode, Laurel Willingham-McLain and Jacques Safari Mwayaona join us to discuss a program in which faculty work with trained student consultants to improve the student learning experience. Laurel is a consulting faculty developer at the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence at Syracuse University. Jacques is a Faculty Development Fellow, also at Syracuse University. Laurel and Jacques both work with the Students Consulting on Teaching program at Syracuse University.
Show Notes
- Students Consulting on Teaching (SCOT) – Syracuse University
- Students Consulting on Teaching (SCOT) – Brigham Young University
- Ursula Sorenson
- Jessamyn Neuhaus
- Students Assessing Teaching and Learning (SATAL)
- Adriana Signorini
Transcript
John: Faculty members often design and revise courses with limited direct feedback from students. In this episode, we discuss a program in which faculty work with trained student consultants to improve the student learning experience.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guests today are Laurel Willingham-McLain and Jacques Safari Mwayaona. Laurel is a consulting faculty developer at the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence at Syracuse University. Jacques is a Faculty Development Fellow, also at Syracuse University. Laurel and Jacques both work with the Students Consulting on Teaching program at Syracuse University. Welcome, Laurel and Jacques.
Laurel: Thank you.
Jacques: Thank you.
John: Today’s teas are:… Laurel, Are you drinking tea?
Laurel: I am drinking tea and I am drinking Throat Coat with lemon echinacea and honey, because I’ve been congested for about two months. Allergies are great in Maryland.
John: And Jacques?
Jacques: Well, I am drinking today a black tea with lemon lift. And as you can hear, it was a little bit hard for me to kind of pronounce the whole name. There is a fun thing that I found in American culture about food and the naming of the food. Most of the time they will give the full name and even the ingredients in the food that you are getting. And sometimes it will be like, ice cream. There’s so many variety of ice cream I cannot even name, so I really find that’s really, really interesting and really fun.
Rebecca: One of my favorite parts about the podcast is finding out all the interesting things that people are drinking, for sure. Today I have English afternoon, John.
John: And I have a spring cherry green tea today, continuing with the ongoing cherry tea flavor discussion.
Rebecca: Yeah,the tea smells good but tastes terrible, yes. [LAUGHTER] So we’ve invited you here to discuss your work on the Students Consulting on Teaching Program at Syracuse. Can you talk about when this program started and what the goal of the program is?
Laurel: So we piloted this program in the spring of 2023 with just two partnerships, and our goal is to have short-term partnerships between a faculty member and a student consultant who is trained to help faculty gather learner feedback. And so the idea is for the student consultants and the faculty together to imagine small, meaningful changes that they can make right away in their courses. We call it SCOT for short, and I just have to give a shout out. We built on the work of others. We took the name from Ursula Sorensen’s program at Brigham Young University, and we took a lot of input from Adriana Signorini, our dear colleague at UC Merced. And I also just want to say that if anyone’s interested in this work, the Special Interest Group Co-creating and Partnerships through the POD Network is your go to place. Jacques and I are so supported by them.
John: Suppose that a faculty member wishes to get some feedback on their class. Could you walk us through the steps of how this process works?
Laurel: So, the Center for Teaching and Learning excellence advertises that we have partnerships available through our newsletter, through New Faculty Orientation, through word of mouth. And so they get invited, and they register, they sign up at the very beginning of the semester to be a partner. And then Jacques and I meet with them very briefly, and our director, Jessamyn Neuhaus, gives a great shout out of her support. We work with them on the three methods that we’re going to be using, that they can choose from, and what their expectations are in terms of time commitment and their commitment to the student consultant.
Jacques: If I may add something there, I think the part of commitment and know what they are expecting, the expectations, is really, really important part. Because knowing what would be the time they will be giving to the program and what they could expect from student consultants is a very good, important part. Because sometimes you might have faculty, it would be maybe their first time they’re working with student consultants in a professional setting, let’s say, viewing students as collaborators. And it’s really, really important that we have that part of helping them to know what to expect from those students.
Rebecca: You mentioned that there’s three ways that a student consultant can work with a faculty member. Can you talk us through what those three ways are?
Laurel: Sure. So for each of these ways, we expect about three to four hours of faculty commitment over a month in the middle of the semester, and they can choose from among: observation of the class, small group instructional feedback, which we loosely call focus groups, even though it’s not technically a focus group, and early course surveys. For each of these methods, the student consultant meets first with the faculty partner to explore what their teaching interest or issue is and which method might be best. And together, they come to that decision, then they administer it, and then there’s a debriefing meeting, and then there’s a final report written.
Jacques: In our recruitment process for faculty, when we send them an invitation, we kind of propose them already those three methods, and they can choose from them, or they can choose that they’re not sure yet. And when they meet with the student consultant, since the student consultant is already trained to understand those methods and also to know what is the situation or to understand or to grasp the perfect method to use in a particular situation, during the first meeting that student consultant have with their faculty partners, they kind of confront their two views… I shouldn’t say, actually confront… it’s about mutual understanding. Discuss, exchanging ideas, and they come to an agreement which method they should use. So even though the faculty might have chosen to use class visits, for example, in the discussions they can discuss, and they say, okay, yeah, this will be just an early class survey, and they go with early class survey. So it’s always this understanding on where’s the need and try to meet the offer of method that we have for them.
John: How are students selected to participate in this program?
Jacques: Yeah, I can speak to that since I am the one working almost all the time with students, and Laurel dedicates more time to faculty, and I dedicate more time to students, like 70% to students, 20% to faculty for me, 70% to faculty for Laura, and 20% to students. So the way we try to select our students is we have two categories of students. We have the first-timers, those students who come for the first time to the program, and we recruit them through, most of the time, sending invitations or collaborating with other research units around the campus. And yeah, I can shout out to our first-year seminar program, which has sent to us very good candidates. And we also try to use, or maybe have our advocates, which are the past faculty who did this program, or past student consultants who found this program interesting, and they kind of recommended their friend or former student to come to the program. For those first-timers, normally, they go through an interview for us to try to understand, what are their class schedule, and if they are a good fit for the program. And there is a second category of students, which is mostly the returning students, and that is the biggest number that we have, because when students get into this program, they love it, and they stay until they graduate from Syracuse University. So the big number of student consultants are mostly those who are returning from past semester, and they stay and continue working with the program because of the value they get from it. And to date, we have had 24 unique student consultants. When I say unique consultants, I mean that counting once by name, but most of them return. And for those 24 unique students, we have had, like, more than 1000 of enrolled students impacted, which is kind of a ratio of one student consultant for more than 40 enrolled students impacted, which is huge for us.
Rebecca: What kind of training are you providing these students to get them up to speed and ready to work with faculty to give them this consulting capabilities?
Jacques: That’s a great question, actually, because of the diversity of students we get into the program, students come from all over the campus, and so far, we had had like students coming from the seven schools out of the 13 schools that we have here on campus, and most of them are double majors. So there’s a huge diversity of student consultants that we have. So now the training that we use to give them is two to four weeks of training, very compact training, and the training is about the methods that Laurel mentioned earlier, namely the early course feedback, class observation visits, small group instructional design, and we help them to rate, to understand the method, and also to practice. There’s so much role-playing that we do in the program for them to understand how this can work out, and most importantly, is also to train, and help them to shift their view from the relationships that they had with faculty which is mostly vertical, if I can say so, vertical relationship. Now they have to shift into a relationship, a more professional relationship, with faculty that they will be working with. So I think that is one of the most important training that we provide them with, so that when they go into the field, they start talking with the faculty as consultants, not only as students, but also as student and consultant at the same time to provide consulting to faculty.
John: How have faculty responded to this process?
Laurel: It’s a growing interest, largely through word of mouth, and then now that Jessamyn Neuhaus is our director, she is making this a focus of our center, that there will be different kinds of partnerships, of which SCOT (students consulting on teaching) is just one. And so many people are curious, because it’s a very different kind of relationship. It’s different from any other relationship they have at the university. So at first it was a little difficult to recruit, but I think we’re going to have more than we can accommodate soon.
Rebecca: How many faculty have you had participating in a typical year?
Laurel: There’s no typical year. Across the four semesters, we’ve had 32 unique faculty partners in 37 partnerships, and they represent, just like the students, they represent seven of the 13 schools and also a study abroad program. So we piloted with two in spring 2023. In fall 2024 we had the incredible privilege of having a cohort of about nine faculty from Design Studio in the School of Architecture, and together they debriefed, and together they planned on how to get student feedback. And that was really exciting. And then in spring 2024 we had eight separate partnerships, not a cohort model. And this fall, in 2024 we’ve had 16. So it has varied.
John: Participating in this as a student consultant takes a fair amount of time. Is there some type of compensation provided to the students who serve in this consulting role?
Jacques: Yes, actually, this is a paid position for student consultants, and there’s actually a good budget that is being allocated to this program. I think the university, and mostly we should be grateful to our new director who’s really working to expand this program, and the value that the university is giving to this program. We think the budget will continue to grow and we will be able to accommodate more students. And in addition to that financial or monetary benefit they get, there’s a huge professional experience they get from this, which is more than money. Many of them actually have reported, actually, growth professionally from when they got into this program, and when they leave the program. They’ve grown a lot, and that can be even seen in the reports that they do when they finish this program. It is really a very short program, but it’s really powerful in terms of the skills that it provides students in this small period of time and empowering the students to believe in themselves and what they can provide. And also so many students who have this consulting component in their programs, and when they come into the SCOT program, they kind of practice, they kind of learn or grow those skills that they need and put them into the consulting work. I see the students coming, for example, from human services, from business, from marketing, data analytics, or public policy and other fields who really need this consulting part of their training. And when they come into this program, they love it, because they start practicing, they start seeing faculty who are their “client”, and we can see how they interact with them. So this is kind of a push for them to practice the skills and already to be into the professional enivronment. So it’s not only finance, it’s also those skills that they get. Moreover, that also, I think, is really important to mention about those students who are former student consultants, who got good admission into good graduate schools after this program. Because I guess showing that you’ve been practicing your skills while you are still at university, kind of show how committed you are to your growth into academia and professional world. So yeah, that is also another important part that the students gain from this program.
Rebecca: One of the things that each of the student consultants is doing, no matter what method they’re doing, is some data collection. They’re either observing, they’re running focus group like activities, or they’re doing surveys, and then they’re consolidating that information into a report and providing that back to the faculty and debriefing. Is there some bigger data that’s being collected about the program itself, to measure the impact of the program?
Laurel: You know your timing is just beautiful, Rebecca, because I am elbow deep in data, in findings, in information from our people. It’s very emotional for me because of what they’re saying. So we keep track of the numbers. You saw that. 37 partnerships, 32 faculty, 24 unique student consultants and over 1000 enrolled students impacted, but most importantly, we gather the stories and the experiences. And so with the student consultants, we had a three-step process, a survey that they responded to individually, Jacques and I lifted out themes and places where we needed clarification and met with them in their weekly student consultant meeting to look at things that weren’t clear to us. For example, how Teams is organized, so it’s clear to them where to put their tracking and documentation from their consultations. Another one was what their final report should look like. And so we got clarification on two or three or four topics from the individual survey, and that was the program-level view. What should we keep? What should we change? How’s the onboarding? How’s the middle section? How’s the support? And then Jacques and I met individually with each of the 11 student consultants for about 15, 20 minutes to find out what the experience was like for them, how it fits their future goals, how we can be better in supporting them and who they recommend. And so Jacques already said that they emphasize communication skills, that just immediately comes to their lips when you ask, what has this program provided for you in terms of your personal growth. And then professionalism. Like he said, the opportunity to consult, getting a window into the life of faculty, which helps them as students in their own courses, as well. Collaboration and also this semester, a new thing was that their relationship with one another changed. So we had two different groups come into the SCOT program that were already very close friends, and they, on their own, brought up the fact that they see each other differently now. They’re not just football watching buddies or sorority sisters at breakfast together, but now they go to each other for professional consulting and mentoring for one another, like, how shall I solve this communication problem with Professor Jones? What’s a question that would get at this kind of issue, and that was exciting for us to see their relationships with one another growing. And then I could talk about faculty. So we debrief the faculty in pairs, again, 15, 20 minutes online, and we do that so they can learn from each other. So many times over the past few years, we’ve heard faculty say, “Oh, I thought I was the only one who was dealing with this issue with my students”, or “I was really curious to know what my student consultant partner was doing with another faculty member,” and they embrace the importance of the student perspective. For example, two or three of them talked about how they thought their enrolled students weren’t engaged in class because they were bored and they found out that they were nervous. There were things that they needed to do to prepare the soil for engagement. Another person found out that her group of students had been away on study abroad since the prerequisite course, and so they’d forgotten and so they weren’t ready to engage in the class in a way that would show that they had forgotten the basics. And so now she’s incorporating some basic review into that. A second way is that they can be vulnerable with a student in a way that they can’t be vulnerable with their faculty colleagues. And one woman even said, “You know, we tend to complain as faculty colleagues, but then I have this student consultant who’s here to help me and to affirm my work, and is in solidarity with me. And we don’t complain. We just work on getting things better,” that the student consultants help the faculty partners think of survey or small focus-group questions that they would never have thought of on their own, so they really collaborate in that. And then two or three people this semester talked about how they’d been wanting to make changes in their teaching, but they just never made time for it, but because they had this really short timeline of meeting, working, meeting, and report, they got stuff done that they’d never gotten done before, and now they have homework. One woman said “my slides need to be so much better,” and another faculty member said “my assignments need to be better.” And so I am going to find out if it would be okay this next semester for them to start at the very beginning of the semester and work on those two issues that they had talked about with previous student consultants. Two people had students look at their online materials, and one person gave us this beautiful quote that “their student consultant served, not only as a sounding board, but as someone that they could spell out their thoughts and doubts and questions too, but also a link between them and online learning.” For example, she found out, and this probably won’t surprise a lot of people, but our students don’t really read their emails. They don’t prioritize them, and in fact, if you’re working with a faculty member, you need to. So the student consultant helped the faculty partner be able to communicate with the enrolled students about how important communication would happen in that class. And then finally… you can tell, I’ve just been reading these… finally, they get a much stronger response rate on the early course surveys, and they can ask their own specific questions. And we have one faculty member and student consultant who have institutional review board approval to write about their project and to ask very specific questions about teaching techniques. So those are just some of the ways it’s been fruitful for faculty, and I’m excited to share those hot off the press findings with you.
Jacques: Just to add an idea about the exciting parts of the learning between faculty and students, I think Laurel mentioned some where the student could open a window into the faculty instructor’s world, and that really made a huge difference in the lives of the students. So the student understood how much work the instructors and everyone working to help them, put into the preparation of material, put into trying to help students learn. So even the worries that faculty have when they see their students not doing well, and although that actually helps students to understand how much faculty care about students. In the results, we saw some student consultants considering becoming themselves instructors or faculty in the future, which is very unusual for students who are still undergrad or the students studying at the university, to start thinking already how they could become faculty themselves.
John: You’ve already talked a little bit about plans to perhaps expand the program to reach more faculty and more students. Do you have any other plans in terms of future directions of this program?
Jacques: Yes, actually, with our new director, we have been discussing this a lot, and we are planning to expand more this program, making it efficient when we’re expanding, because when we expand, there will be so many challenges coming into the program. And one way we are thinking of making this program efficient is about time management. Since this is an early course mini course, one way of seeing what’s going on and see how we could improve the learning of the students. Time has always been a challenge, so starting as early as possible can help faculty to know what’s going on in the classroom and implement the results of the student consultant will be communicating to them. So this semester, and next semester, we’ll be focusing on how we can make this training efficient. And instead of having that two to four weeks training while the semester has already started, we are trying to move that training online within an asynchronous program, so that the students who are recruited this semester can start already training themselves during the winter break or summer so that they can start working when the semester starts. So when they finish the training, they can start working with faculty on day one, the first week of the semester, they can start already interacting with faculty. This semester, we are really blessed to have our student consultants coming back. So the student consultants who are in the program, most of them are staying because they want to do again next semester. So we are blessed because we’ll be using their expertise to go through the training that we have moved online. They can go through it, give us feedback on how we could improve it and make it better for the next semester. So this semester, the point that we are focusing on is time management, and we are moving all the training into the break period before the semester starts, and we have students who will be going through the program and test and give us the feedback as quickly as possible.
Rebecca: Sounds like some interesting developments. For sure, we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”
Jacques: Well, that’s a good question. Actually, it’s kind of reflecting on what we have achieved ourselves. And going through this program has been actually eye opening for me to see the impact of one student consultant impacting forty enrolled students, that’s huge. That’s a big impact that we are getting there. And I’ve been thinking a lot on how I could replicate the same experience somewhere else in so many other environments internationally as well. I think this model is mostly in the US and UK, and somehow in some countries in Europe, but there’s so many other countries that need this kind of model to change and bring innovation into their teaching and learning. And I’ve been thinking a lot about creating an NGO that would be really providing this service to other universities around the world, in Africa or Asia or somewhere else, and to implement this model, because it’s not everyone who have all the resources that we are blessed to have here at Syracuse University. So extending and providing help to other universities or professional training services. it’s not really only limited to university, it can be K-12, it can be professional training, and help them to implement this model. I think that will increase the impact, and that’s what I’m really thinking hard on doing next.
Rebecca: Sounds like some big plans for sure.
SAFARI: Yes, I think it’s really big [LAUGHTER] I still have to figure out how to plan this and make it happen.
Laurel: My plans are smaller [LAUGHTER] in scale, although I hope to be a part of whatever it is that Jacques does in the future. For many years, over a decade, another person who has directed the Center for Teaching and Learning and I have felt called to offer small retreats for women leaders. And we’re talking about the everyday kind of women leaders who teach and coordinate and manage and mentor. And so we recently met again and said, “Are we ever going to do this?” And I think we are, and they are small in the sense of just a few people, maybe in a house with catered food and lots of space for napping. Because if you don’t have napping in a retreat, it’s not a retreat. You have to have good food, idyllic place, various senses used: taste and smell and sight and so forth, and napping availability. And so just to make that kind of space and to bring some of our leadership expertise to bear, but mostly to help women reflect on their identity as leaders, their expertise, their calling, and just to deepen their understanding of their own vocation. So that’s my dream. I don’t know. We’ll see if it comes.
Rebecca: I like the true dreams in this “what’s next” for sure.
John: Thank you both for joining us, and we appreciate the information you’ve shared.
Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it.
SAFARI: Thank you.
Laurel: It’s been a delight.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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