The Center for Teaching and Learning is currently recruiting faculty partners to work with CTL Student Partners in Fall 2025!
The CTL Student Partner program creates partnerships between undergraduate students and members of the faculty to enrich courses at Boise State. As a faculty partner in the program, you’ll work closely with a Student Partner (an outstanding undergraduate student recruited and trained by the Center for Teaching & Learning) to make meaningful changes that improve the student experience in a particular course. Student Partners offer feedback and input on the class grounded in the student perspective. In collaboration with their faculty partner, Student Partners:
- attend the class they are focused on, offering feedback to instructors based on their own perspective as students.
- use survey and interview tools to gather feedback from students in the class.
- prepare reports for the instructor based on their observations and student feedback.
- help instructors to understand how students are experiencing their class.
- serve as thought partners for instructors in considering strategies for responding to student feedback.
Faculty who have worked with the program previously have reported that it helped them to make changes (for both the current term, and future iterations of the courses) in the areas of active learning, pacing, student engagement, and making their courses more welcoming for all learners. In addition, they’ve reported that:
- “My student partner was incredible and offered amazing insight. I learned a lot from [them] and was able to make small changes to the course throughout the semester that helped student engagement.”
- “I was reminded of a few simple things I can do to significantly impact how students receive the course.”
- “Having another set of eyes in the back of a very large room was incredibly insightful in terms of understanding and quantifying student engagement. With all the things I have going on in my mind when teaching, it’s not always feasible to pay attention to every single student’s level of engagement in a large course.”
- “The benefit for me was the access to feedback that is less susceptible to the power dynamics that surround the student-professor relationship.”
- “It helped me to start understanding the generational differences that exist between me and my students.”
- “Being able to get daily feedback that was actionable, and frequent anonymized input from students, let me course-correct tangibly right away!”
- “My student partner was able to collect opinions / experiences that are seldom communicated directly from student to instructor.”
We’d love to have you as a faculty partner for the fall, but spots are limited! To apply, please complete an application by Friday, May 2.
Author: Daniel Sanford