When I think about student success, I tend to take the long view. When I think about student success, I think of alumni, 10 or 15 years post-graduation, who are working at a job in their field. They are financially secure, or getting there. They are living in a community where they have roots, and they’re in good health.
My thinking evolved to think about student success this way in 2014, when the first Great Jobs, Great Lives report was published by Gallup and Purdue. It reports on a survey of over 30,000 college alumni, in which they were asked about their college experiences, their current employment, and five different areas of wellbeing (the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index):
- Purpose Well-Being: Liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals
- Social Well-Being: Having strong and supportive relationships and love in your life
- Financial Well-Being: Effectively managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security
- Community Well-Being: The sense of engagement you have with the areas where you live, liking where you live, and feeling safe and having pride in your community
- Physical Well-Being: Having good health and enough energy to get things done on a daily basis
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What they found, initially, was unsurprising: life in college matters for life after college. But there was a surprise: based on the data, they concluded that it’s not where you go to college that shapes your life. It’s what you do while you’re there that matters. Particularly important was that, as students, they felt supported and had various deep learning experiences. The more of these experiences students had while in college, the better their long-term outcomes after college.
Feeling supported had to do with relationships with professors and mentors. Specifically, alumni cited having a professor who made them excited about learning, having a professor who cared about them as a person, and having mentors who asked them challenging questions to help them really consider their goals, and encouraged them to pursue their goals and dreams.
Deep learning experiences are often experiential, for example, an internship or a job where students are applying what they’ve learned in class. Other activities that fall into this category include working on an extended project that runs one or more semesters in length, or being actively involved in extracurricular activities and organizations.
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Let’s dig deeper into relationships with professors and mentors. That’s what Peter Felten and Leo Lambert (2020) did when they interviewed nearly 400 students, faculty, and staff at 29 institutions, eliciting their thoughts and experiences about the power of relationships in enriching a college education.
Building an environment that fosters these relationships is something that each of us can do. There are four principles underlying a relationship-rich education.
- First, all students must experience genuine welcome and deep care. This builds a sense of belonging and lays groundwork for students to thrive. Genuine welcome is not only for the first day of class. Create an environment of “relentless welcome” and “continuous care” for your students by …
- Learning their names;
- Asking how they are doing … and waiting to hear the answer;
- Helping students get to know each other.
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- Second, relationships are a powerful means to inspire all students to learn. In class, share your excitement about the topic. Share why you got into this field, and what you hope to pass on to your students. Sharing your own excitement, combined with an interest in your students’ success, is a powerful motivator to learn. One of the findings in Felten and Lambert’s book is that students will work harder for people who know them and care about them.
- Third, all students must develop webs of significant relationships. The expression “it takes a village” holds true when it comes to seeking mentors. Not only do different people provide different perspectives, they also give students access to multiple networks. This web of relationships leverages the strength of weak ties (Granovetter, 1973) and enables what Felten and Lambert call “warm handoffs” that help students create new relationships – for example, a connection to a faculty member who is looking for students to join her research team, or a connection to another student who is looking to carpool to campus.
- Fourth and finally, all students need meaningful relationships to help them and to challenge them to explore the big questions in their lives. Questions like, who am I? What is my purpose in the world? How can I contribute to my family, to my community? What gifts do I have to offer the world? What gives meaning to my life? Doing this kind of thinking in conversation with people they trust will help them think more critically and more empathetically about their identities, their aspirations, and their place in the world.
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At New York Tech, we have already seen how much difference a relationship can make with the dramatic success of the Achieving Collegiate Excellence (ACE) Program. Ask any faculty or staff member who has been an ACE Coach about the program, and they will likely tell you how it has benefited them as much as the students.
We can build on that success – and help students build that web of significant relationships – by ensuring that our classes are relationship-rich. Building relationships with our students helps them feel that they matter in this classroom, they matter on this campus. Here are some strategies that can create that environment of deep care. You probably do some of them already; see if there are one or two on the list that are new to you:
- Learn your students’ names early in the semester, and address them by name in class.
- Ask your students what they want to get out of the class, and how it connects to their lives.
- Give students meaningful feedback on their work, early in the semester.
- Introduce students to the support resources on campus.
- Get to class early, or stay a few minutes after class, and chat with students. Ask about their weekends, their jobs, their families.
- Use examples and problems that students can relate to in their own lives.
- Share your enthusiasm for your field with your students. How did you come to love your discipline? What first attracted you to it?
- Explain the purpose of office hours, and how students will benefit from coming to them.
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Simply doing small things that are within our control can help create this relationship-rich environment that so dramatically impacts students’ lives. I leave you with this thought: what can you do to create a relationship-rich environment in your classroom?
Note: New York Tech Libraries has purchased the e-book; you can access it and download a copy to read offline at https://bit.ly/RREatNYIT (New York Tech login required).
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