Pedagogical Partnership

The Sherrerd Center and the Wurtele Center would like to offer a special Pedagogical Partnerships Program for Fall 2026 that would enable faculty/staff who teach and a student partner to focus on any teaching issue as it pertains to GenAI. Are you interested in experimenting with GenAI in some way in your Fall class, or build on an existing experiment? Are you wanting to craft a course that excludes the use of GenAI in a principled way? Do you want to design ways to be in conversation with your students about GenAI policies or usage?  Any and all such teaching conundrums are welcome to be explored through this partnership program. The goal here is to enable faculty to thoughtfully work with student partners to address a pressing teaching problem in the face of GenAI.

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 one of the most pressing teaching issues of our time.

Faculty and staff teachers interested in pursuing a student pedagogical partnership should identify an intellectual project (a specific driving question, problem, or experiment that pertains to GenAI) they would like to pursue and an appropriate student partner who would help strengthen pedagogy and enhance the course experience. We are particularly interested in projects around GenAI that actively engage student partners with students in your course. Please note that pedagogical partnerships with the highest rates of success are ones where the student partner is the only student worker in the class to allow for role clarity. 

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
• Develop new teaching resources that introduce complex technical tools to students 
  
  To apply, please fill out the form with partnership details by Friday, May 8, 2026. 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

• Attend a faculty orientation session to meet with Sara and Megan before the start of the fall semester
• Mentor student partners and help facilitate their reflection as they explore pedagogical practices
• Participate in the program kick-off lunch meeting on Thursday, September 10, 2026
• Meet with your student partner once a week and approve their time in Workday
• Join a mid-semester luncheon session with faculty and student partners on Tuesday, Oct 20 from 12:15-1:15pm
• Complete a final evaluation at the end of the semester and participate in a closing luncheon session 

Student partner expectations

• Attend Student Pedagogical Partner Orientation sessions before the start of the Fall semester (5:30–7:30 p.m. EST on Zoom)
• Participate in the program kick-off lunch meeting on Thursday, September 10, 2026
• Meet with your faculty partner once a week
• Attend class and/or work together with your faculty partner on your pedagogical partnership project
• Attend pedagogical leadership workshops/luncheon sessions with the Wurtele Center (lunch provided); Monday, Sept 28 from 12:15-1:30pm, Tuesday, Oct 20 from 12:15-1:15pm, Monday, Nov 9 from 12:15-1:30pm
• 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 luncheon session

The Sherrerd Center pays the student partners an hourly wage for their time (up to six 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 aim to effectively leverage student partner expertise/experience in exploring a pedagogical challenge around GenAI. 

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.