TLC series: Teachers and students working as partners to improve education

The work of monitoring and analysing educational trends and innovation carried out by the eLearning Innovation Center (eLinC) focuses on internal and external best practices to contribute to the development of the educational model at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). José López Ruiz and Desirée Gómez Cardosa, members of the Teaching and Learning Analysis team, have carried out an analysis of centres responsible for promoting educational innovation in universities. Each article in the TLC series will deal with an aspect linked to the work undertaken at these centres.This article looks at how teachers and students can work as partners to bring about improvements in teaching, and innovation in learning.

Why is teachers and students working as partners important?

Involving students in certain processes and aspects of their university education – ‘students as partners’ (SaP) – is a widespread practice in higher education, which has a positive influence on students and their professional development.

A well-known definitionof SaP that is widely accepted among professionals and academics is that it is “a collaborative, reciprocal process through which all participants have the opportunity to contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision-making, implementation, investigation, or analysis” (Cook-Sather et al., 2014). Plurality, reciprocity, trust and empowerment are among the nine values identified in The Advance HE Framework  as contributing to successful student partnerships. However, they must also be reflected in the strategies and culture of institutions that use SaP practices. Genuine partnership practices can be achieved that significantly improve the student experience by encouraging dialogue, reflection and collaborative, inclusive and ethical interactions in which power is shared (Matthews, 2017).

Identifying the different options or forms of partnership most frequently adopted in higher education institutions is not easy in a field that, to a large extent, is still not theorized (Gravett et al., 2020) and where the main agents in universities may hold different perceptions regarding approaches to partnership. Matthews et al. (2018), as cited in Gravett et al. (2020), point out that “As SaP practices shift from individual praxis to institutional strategies for transformation, understanding how formal, senior leaders understand and engage with SaP becomes relevant.”

Good practices that involve students in teaching

Advance HE’s Essential Frameworks for Enhancing Student Success: Student Engagement Through Partnership (Healey & Healey, 2019) offers a comprehensive view of how teaching staff can engage students through the following areas of partnership, taken from Healey, Flint, & Harrington (2014), which we’ve added to with noteworthy practices identified in our analysis here at the eLinC.

Learning, teaching and assessment

This area includes peer learning and assessment, tutoring, co-teaching and other forms of active learning as increasingly common forms of partnership.

The eLinC report on centres has identified cases where students act as tutors of students in lower years.At Princeton University’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, the peer tutoring programme for undergraduate students has a range of benefits and values, including altruism, as students help their peers, and receive payment. New tutors attend a three-hour orientation and training course, and the programme allows them to develop specific tutoring skills, such as group facilitation; formulating clear, useful explanations, and conducting assessments. The first type of tutoring they carry out is group tutoring, where the aim is to create an environment similar to that of a study group to help students become flexible and independent problem solvers. Tutors facilitate interaction to help students to think, explain, solve problems and actively integrate their knowledge. The second type is individual tutoring, which provides personalized and individualized assistance for students who want help with specific parts of the course.

Another form is that of Assistants in Instruction (AI). The AI Orientation service trains graduate students as student learning assistants at Princeton. Theymeet students in small groups, leading discussions and problem-solving sessions, teaching labs, answering student queries, grading activities, and assisting in course design and delivery.

Subject-based research and inquiry

Many institutions have explored ways to involve students in subject-based research and inquiry.

The Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre (TALIC) at the University of Hong Kong is involved in promoting a culture of partnership as a strategy for innovation and improving learning. The centre helps facilitate cooperation initiatives that involve large numbers of students in curricular and pedagogical co-creation projects, dealing with content and other areas for improvement. The centre’s specialist staff usually participate in the shared journey of the projects. For example, there is the inter-institutional Co-creating the Future of Education: A Student Partnership Project developed by TALIC staff with other universities in Hong Kong, which aims to support and promote SaP practices, including innovation and research objectives linked to new pedagogical models.

As a framework for collaboration, they also promote an SaP Community of Practice (CoP) as an avenue for sharing practices that are transforming learning at the university.

Scholarship of teaching and learning

These practices point to the growth of student participation in projects like Scholarship of Teaching of Learning (SoTL), where students undertake projects designed to enhance the university learning experience for themselves and their peers.

At Minnesota State University, Mankato, students interested in improving teaching and learning processes can make suggestions on how these processes could be modified for better results. The Students Consulting on Teaching (SCOT) programme, designed to obtain feedback on the courses at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, allows students to be paid to observe certain aspects of the classroom and interactions (group projects, tests, teaching styles, assignments, etc.) to provide information for the teacher to get a better idea of what is happening in the learning process. This TLC initiative is linked to the evidence-based activities and student participation in quality processes identified by Wright (2023) as typical of a ‘sieve’ [A3] centre, the S in her HITS classification of teaching and learning centres.

Curriculum design and pedagogic consultancy

According to the authors of the guide, involving students in curriculum design and pedagogic consultancy is perhaps the least developed of the different areas, although there are many examples of students producing pedagogical resources.

The University of Queensland also has examples of how students are involved in the creation of teaching resources, such as contributing to the production of content for the Digital Essentials modules aimed at developing digital skills during their learning.

We would include in this grouping an example of co-creation led by Katz and Van Allen (2020), members of faculty at the City University of New York, CUNY, to design open educational practices and reposition students as producers and controllers of their own learning. They developed the Framework for Collaborative Design of Renewable Assignments so that students could co-create authentic lesson plans and open educational resources (OER), which they could then share beyond their own learning. Through a process of reflection by the teaching staff and the intentional development of assignments designed to be ‘renewable’, the framework allows students to be positioned as creators of open content in the form of the artefacts resulting from the assignments (essays, poems, videos, songs, etc.). As the authors themselves point out, co-creation allows educators to create meaningful learning experiences for students when they are involved in more challenging and rewarding teaching practices.

Another interesting practice where students are involved in the creation of learning resources and the co-design of courses is the Collaborative Teaching Initiative, at Princeton’s McGraw Center. Graduate students in humanities and social sciences who have successfully passed the general exam and who have already demonstrated excellence in teaching as AI (assistants in instruction, as mentioned above) can apply to participate in this project, which allows them to co-design and co-teach an undergraduate course at Princeton with a faculty mentor.

A number of authors, including Killam et al. (2024), refer to the value of co-creation to increase authentic assessment by improving the perceived realism of assignments, helping students to do what is too difficult for them to achieve alone, and developing metacognitive skills for life.

Outcomes of co-created authentic assessment (Fig. 1, Killam et al., 2024)

Integrated schemes

A recent trend among some institutions is to develop inter-institutional strategic initiatives that cover more than one of these areas of partnership and sometimes include others, such as governance.

One of the initiatives included in the eLinC TLC report, and also in the Advance HE guide, which in our opinion best exemplifies this culture of partnership between students and teachers with a wide range of co-creation activities both inside and outside the classroom are the Student-Staff Partnerships (SSP) at the University of Queensland. These collaborations and the resulting projects, coming from the educational research activity of the staff, highlight the important levels of involvement of students in numerous processes affecting the university educational model, both in governance and in curricular co-creation, the creation of teaching materials, assessment and feedback processes, etc. As the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation (ITaLI) says, students can work together with academic staff on projects designed to improve the teaching and learning experience, the study experience at the university, and on initiatives linked to governance, including a strategy to improve student participation and representation in governance. Students who wish to participate can propose new ideas or projects or join an existing project. There are four rounds each year and students are eligible for a grant. They can also share digital experiences and skills in the lab; for example, teacher and student co-creation of digital learning resources in the Digital Practices Lab.

Conclusions

As we have seen, there has been a boom in opportunities to contribute to educational improvement through SaP projects in contemporary higher education. Likewise, the level of student participation has increased in numerous areas of their learning experience in universities, especially those that place them at the centre of the educational model. Students are the main agent of learning and – through their experience and an evaluation of their metacognitive process – can provide teaching staff with valuable direct empirical knowledge about the progress of their learning. As promoters and guarantors of teaching and learning policies and experts in instructional design, TLCs are aware of the positive impact that these collaborative partnerships have on the development of meaningful learning experiences. These experiences, in addition to generating personal relationships, create a broader, more inclusive sense of belonging to the community. Gravett et al. (2020) define partnership as follows: “Partnership is not simply an individual practice but an ethos: a dialogic and values-based approach to learning and teaching that has the potential to be transformative, developmental and fun.” Aware of this, those involved in educational innovation are increasingly considering conceptualizing and carrying out initiatives that promote this shared learning within the university culture.

References

Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C., Felten, P. (2014). Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching: A Guide for Faculty. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Katz, S. (22 October 2021). Co-creating with students: practical considerations and approaches. Resources for academics and university staff. Times Higher Education. Available at https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/cocreating-students-practical-considerations-and-approaches

Killam, L. A., Camargo-Plazas, P., Luctkar-Flude, M. (2024). Learner-Educator Co-creation: A Case for Enhancing Authentic Assessment in Nursing Education. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 15(1).

Gravett, K., Kinchin, I. M., Winstone, N. E. (2020). ‘More than customers’: conceptions of students as partners held by students, staff, and institutional leaders. Studies in Higher Education, 45(12), 2574–2587. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1623769

Matthews, K. E., Dwyer, A., Russell, S., Enright, E. (2018). It is a complicated thing: leaders’ conceptions of students as partners in the neoliberal university. Studies in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2018.1482268

Wright, M.C. (2023). Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education. Johns Hopkins University Press.