Student Partnerships & Empowerment

From Power to Partnership & Empowerment

In addition to addressing biases, instructors should reflect on who holds power in their classrooms. What does this power afford instructors over students? And how might we create a partnership to balance the power in the classroom? For example, partnerships in assessment involve students and instructors working together to co-create assessments and evaluation criteria. This practice empowers students by valuing their experiences and giving them a voice and a sense of ownership in their learning, and by enabling them to contribute to the assessment process in a meaningful way.

When students are involved in co-creating assessments and/or evaluation criteria, they can better understand the learning goals and expectations of the course and are more likely to be engaged and motivated in their learning. Instructors can also gain insights into students’ learning processes and challenges, which can better inform their instructional practices and support student learning. Instructors can create student partnerships by engaging students as co-learners, co-researchers, co-inquirers, codevelopers and co-designers in their classrooms. In addition, they can involve students in developing and evaluating an assessment rather than simply treating students as recipients of assessments. Examples of student partnerships can include:

• Co-deciding on grading schemes, medium of assessments, and deadlines.
• Gathering feedback on the syllabus.
• Class-constructed assessments (based on student interests) and rubrics.
• Reviewing the meaning and value of a rubric.
• Being transparent with students about how marks will be assigned.
• Empowering students by asking them to provide questions, examples, and content they are interested in and that is meaningful to them.
• Co-creating questions to help students practice and utilize these questions in assessments such as exams.
• Asking students to develop questions for in-class presentations.
• Creating multiple opportunities for feedback, for example, in class, anonymous, and asynchronous opportunities.

Please note instructors should be mindful of which students are most likely to provide feedback (i.e., students who come into institutions with privilege) versus those who do not (i.e., students that may not have a language of entitlement).