Faculty-Student Mentoring (Augusta University-2025)

Cultivating an institutional infrastructure for meaningful faculty-student interactions is a multi-year commitment, and this initial assessment will focus on product development. Once the professional development options are in place, we can construct assessments that measure the impact on student retention and progression.

“Relationship Rich Education” by Peter Felton and Leo Lambert was selected as a text and framework to support and empower faculty to make meaningful connections with students, both inside and outside of the classroom, to foster student success.

A recent institutional project involved the development of a Faculty Toolkit for Student Success. The final product is housed in D2L and connects institutional data points with best practices on classroom pedagogy and student success. AU’s goal is to include a module based on the book by Felton and Lambert, Relationship-Rich Education. The module will allow all faculty, both those who previously operated as advisors as well as those who did not, to build awareness and a skill set centered on relational perspectives.

Moreover, given the recent inclusion of student success in faculty promotion and tenure requirements, AU intends on developing content that connects with college guidelines for student success and provides a template to include in promotion packets. The goal of the program will be to foster a culture that prioritizes relationship-building between faculty and students inside and outside the classroom. The plan is to develop a content module that highlights the variety of interactions that generate supportive relationships between faculty and students. The content would include offering such as:

• Guidance and strategies on supporting students as it relates to degree, career path, or graduate school.
• Additional academic support.
• Research opportunities.

Over the past year, AU has taken some initial steps to outline the module content and this year we intend to utilize “Relationship Rich Education” to highlight the multiple mechanisms faculty can use to build strong relationships with students. By the end of Fall 2024 a first draft module was developed and shared with approximately 15 faculty stakeholders for feedback. Feedback has been received but has not been applied to the module (departure of Project Lead, Hurricane Helene, and Administrative changes have set us back). According to the adjusted timeline, AU will have a completed product incorporating both feedback and additional ideas from Student Success subject-matter experts 2025.

While the asynchronous module is incomplete, the Center for Instructional Innovation has provided a faculty development workshop that is roughly equivalent:

Motivating Students Part 2: Relatedness (Belonging) - 90 minutes. This workshop focused on fostering student motivation through the Self-Determination Theory concept of relatedness, emphasizing belonging in the classroom and campus community. The session was informed by Peter Felten and Leo Lambert’s Relationship-Rich Education, particularly ideas from:


• Chapter 4: Relationship-Rich Classrooms
• Chapter 6: Mentoring Conversations


The session was organized around two main categories of strategies:


1. Classroom Strategies

• Learning Student Names: Strategies to learn and remember students' names as a foundation for connection.
• Community-Building Activities: The role of regular icebreakers and trust-building exercises.
• Rituals: The use of classroom rituals to create predictable, relationship-building moments.
• Faculty Stories: Sharing discoveries, successes, insights, encountering failure, and managing change.
• Active Learning: Engaging students in peer-to-peer interaction through active learning and assigning multimodal tasks 


2. Beyond-the-Classroom Strategies

• Mentoring in the Moment: Emphasized the value of informal guidance when students need support
• Reinventing Office Hours: Focused on creating more welcoming, engaging, and accessible spaces for student-faculty interaction.
• Connecting Students with Campus Resources: Encouraged normalizing help-seeking by proactively sharing information about academic, wellness, and social resources.
• Using Surveys: Described how intake and check-in surveys can surface student needs and guide instruction.
• Communicating Care: Shared examples of early and mid-semester emails to demonstrate faculty care and gather feedback.

The momentum team has already started planning for Peter Felton to visit the institution to do workshops with faculty, staff, and students in Fall 2025. To prepare for his visit and these relationship building workshops, activities are planned to incorporate the distribution of his book (free of charge by digital download).