The Student Success Strategy We’re Still Overlooking, With Peter Felten

Full Transcript

Dr. Cristi Ford:
What if one of the strongest predictors of whether students learn, persist, and flourish is not a program, a policy, or a piece of technology, but whether they form meaningful relationships along the way? And what would it take to ensure those relationships are not left to chance?
Welcome to Teach and Learn, a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Each week we’ll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K to 20 space. Sharpen your pencils, class is about to begin.

Listeners, welcome back. I’m your host, Dr. Cristi Ford, and I am so pleased to be sharing and starting our fifth season with Dr. Peter Felten, the executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, where he also serves as assistant provost for teaching and learning and professor of history at Elon University. Peter, I am so, so excited to have you joining me today.
Peter Felten:
Thank you, Cristi.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
So I will say to my listeners, I want them to have the context of how I met. We met this past spring when we were both invited to participate in this innovation series and to offer some keynotes. And we didn’t know each other at all before the event. And what was so amazing to me is, Peter, after I left that event, I felt more philosophically aligned with you than almost anyone else I’d shared a speaking stage with. And I thought to myself, we have to get this conversation recorded and share this with our listeners. And listeners, you’re in for a treat because while Peter’s language is different from mine and his research has many depths around the conversation around connection, I left Peter that conversation, that conference resonating in my own work, things that I know that learning is social and people need to be seen before they feel like they can fully engage and that relationships aren’t adjacent to learning.
And you gave me some really good language around your talk. And so what I hope we can do here together today is to double click on some of those areas of your research and really share with an audience here how we can have this conversation around really being intentional about the relationships that students build on campuses. So I’m going to get us started, but before we really dive in and get heady around all the great research you’re doing, I guess I’d love to start with understanding where your own convictions started around how relationships are central to where education began. And then maybe most importantly, was there a person or an experience in your educational journey that changed how you understood learning?
Peter Felten:
Yeah. Well, Cristi first, it’s such a treat to be here because I had the same feeling at that conference. It’s like, could we just let everyone else do their own thing and the two of us talk? For me, I really think back to two moments that were really important for me. And just really briefly, one is my first year, first semester as an undergraduate. And I was a good student, very honest. I had fun, but I’m going to do well and this is what I do. And I was in a philosophy course, final paper, wrote this long paper, tried really hard. The professor gave it back and she gave me an A, but she wrote something on the paper that I could quote and think about to this day, which is, “Peter, this is a really good paper, but you could have written a better paper.
I’d love for you to come talk to me in the spring.” And Cristi, I had to sort of sit with that for a little while because I’m like, “What do you mean I could write a better paper? I got an A.” And I didn’t go see her in the spring and she became something of a mentor to me and just thinking about the purposes of education and capacity and what it feels like when someone really sees something in you that you didn’t even know was there. And then the second thing was maybe a little more humbling. When I was a new faculty member, I was teaching at a community college and I had a senior colleague who I though the world of observed my teaching. And afterwards he sat me down and he was very kind and he’s like, “Peter, you think you’re teaching history?
You need to know you’re teaching students.” And at one level it’s like, duh. And then another level it’s like, “Oh my.” And it was really clear to me just as he and I were having that conversation that I didn’t know who my students were. I didn’t know why they were in the class. I didn’t know. And so it really changed the way I thought about what my work was.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yeah. I resonate with that so strongly because when you think about training you get in doctoral programs, you spend a lot of time thinking about your discipline, you spend a lot of time thinking about research and community of practice and inquiry, but you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to teach, how to engage, how to build community. That’s not something that’s in prerequisite to get a tenure track position. And so I think this fact that you noted that in your experiences and that you took that with some humility, you could have had a different response to that feedback. But as I listened to you talk in the spring, you argue that college can become a series of transactions. You talked about attending class, putting an assignment, earning a credential, but the experiences students remember as you just shared with your own experience are also transformative because they’re relational. And so what moves an interaction from being transactional to transformative?
Peter Felten:
Yeah. I love this question and I want to be super clear. I’m a fan of efficient transactions, so this is not transaction bad. Some things really should be transactional. Some things should be done well that way. The problem is the heart of education, the purposes of education isn’t just a whole bunch of transactions. It’s really our fundamental aim is transformational of helping students understand the world, the discipline themselves in ways that empower them, that change them. And transformation is big and complicated, but I think there’s two things we really need to attend to just in any kind of interaction with students to help to create the possibility of transformation. And there’s two things are really helping students act intentionally and helping students reflect critically about what’s going on. So this can be big momentous things. It can be a feedback on a paper they turned in already.
It can be a student signing up for a credential. They just want to learn this one skill and get out and that should be an effective transaction, but it is also a moment to say, why do you want to learn this skill? What’s it going to empower you? What’s it going to enable you to do? How are you going to be different? How are you going to be able to contribute differently? It’s just asking those kinds of questions create this space for students to think beyond the transaction.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
So I appreciate that because what you are framing is that all transactions aren’t bad, that there is a need for transformation of conversations and engagements and opportunities for connections and also important times that you just need an efficient transaction to be able to move through effortlessly without traction to be able to go through your experience. But I’d love for you to maybe share with us, you shared a couple examples, but in your research, what do students say transformative relationships actually feel like? And maybe what are some of the small behaviors you noted that are communicated that help students see, I see you, you belong here and I believe that you’re capable?
Peter Felten:
Yeah, Cristi, my colleagues and I have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of students around the US at all sorts of institutions about this. And we actually had a little bit of an existential crisis early in our interviews because we were asking students what is something really important faculty or staff do? What’s a question they ask? And over and over students said, “Well, they asked me how are you?” And we’re like, “Really? Really? We’re going to write a book and we’re going to say, ask your students how are you?” And I say that both because students told us that, that it was small things often, not big things, not who are you or something, but how are you? But I think there’s really three things they were saying inside of that that we can do all the time. One is pay attention because really what they don’t, they don’t care about the how are you as a passing comment in the hallway.
They care about the pause after the how are you? And the attention that we’re giving, because I think in our society right now and for a lot of students, attention is precious. We don’t get it very often. Undivided attention is really powerful. So first, really pay attention. Second, I think we need to affirm capacity. I’ve come out of this work, all this research saying my job is to help my students believe they’re more capable than they know they are. Now notice that’s not the same as saying everything you do, Cristi, is golden. In some ways it’s back to the professor saying to me, this is a good paper, you could have written a better paper. That was affirming my capacity in a way that I wasn’t used to because I was used to being affirmed of you got an A, right? And so there’s something beyond that or there’s something beyond this really poor work.
And then I think third is just from talking to lots and lots of faculty and staff, there’s so much well meaning and important attention to care and support and things like this. And I think we need to recognize that our job is to balance support and challenge. That the research actually says, for example, male students of color thrive when we challenge them, explicitly challenge them and say, I know you can do this. I know you’re capable of more. So just being nice or just being caring, thinking about challenge as an act of care I think is really important.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I really love that because I think you’re owning that productive struggle is necessary in learning and there are ways in which we can be deeply connected and human. And I love when you talk about asking someone how you’re doing and it’s the pause to really be intentional and present about what they say, but not just checking a box around being kind and thoughtful, but productively pushing students to do their best work. I think that combination is really powerful, especially in the era and the admit, I have to say it of AI. I just have to say it.
Peter Felten:
Yeah, because AI is always going to say, that’s awesome. I’m here, you’re awesome. And so saying, really, really tell me.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Before we move on, I want you to just for the listeners, and we’re going to put this colleagues who are listening in the show notes, but can you give us the name of the book that you’re referring to when you talk about this research?
Peter Felten:
Yeah, so colleagues and I have written two books about this. So one is called Relationship Rich Education: How Human Connections Drives Student Success. And that book came out in 2020 from Johns Hopkins, and it’s really aimed at the audience of that book is faculty and staff and administrators. And then in 2023, four of us wrote a follow-up book to that called Connections Are Everything: A Student’s Guide to Relationship Rich Education. And because a lot of folks who’d read and responded positively to Relationship Rich said, “There’s a lot we can do, but what do students need to know?” And so we spent a lot of time interviewing a lot of students and getting feedback on our drafts from a lot of students to try to actually write for students to help them understand that yeah, the college should do some things and faculty and staff are going to do some things, but you have a role here too.
And that book’s also from Johns Hopkins, and I’m really proud and happy to say we got a grant to make that book open access. So you should be able to… It’s freely available, no login or anything else through Project Muse, which is Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Excellent. Excellent.
Peter Felten:
You can buy it too. Russ would like me to say that, but don’t buy it.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
You heard it here, colleagues get the open access book, but I appreciate that the writings and the work that we’re talking about here today has been deeply validated by hundreds of conversations with students. I will say when I listened to your talk, there was another phrase that you authored a lot. You said relentless welcome, and it really stayed with me because it really suggested that belonging can’t just be limited to new student orientation or the first day of class or just one encouraging message. Can you talk to the listeners and share a little bit more about what do you mean by a relentless welcome and why does the welcome need to be relentless?
Peter Felten:
Yeah. So yeah, this is one of the benefits of interviewing people because smart people say smart things and you hear phrases like relentless welcome and you just can’t get it out of your head because it’s clear and it captures something really important, which is the research says the students tell us in stories like first day of class matters a lot, that orientation to a new institution or a new program, those are really important, but students need to feel welcome. They need to feel like they matter on the 20th day of class as much as they do on the first day of class. And if you really dig in and talk to a lot of students, they often have doubts as a term unfolds. There’s times where they’re feeling good about everything and there’s times where they’re really wondering if they can do it. And so that warm supportive greeting or that sense of welcome and care, that belief and capacity, having that show up throughout the term is really important.
In fact, the sense that you matter, that your presence in the class and the presence at the institution is valued is I think absolutely fundamental for students learning and their persistence and their wellbeing. And there’s lots of small things we can do, often the sorts of things we do on the first day, but just extending them through the semester.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
So it’s a great strategy on the first day, but show up and keep doing it on the 20th day, on the 50th. Keep
Peter Felten:
Doing it. No, one of my favorite little things, but I like music, so I ask my students what their favorite songs are on the first day of class, as a getting to know you thing. I do a little survey and I create a Spotify playlist and before every class starts, the songs are playing and it’s always their songs or sometimes my songs. Sometimes we all are very happy. Sometimes we laugh about who likes this, whatever. But it’s an interesting way of creating a space that is our space that was created by us together. And that just is different than how a lot of education and how a lot of life feels.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yeah. Gosh, I really resonate with that and the ways in which relationships, they’re evolutionary as well. So there’s not this one. So this relentless welcome gives you an opportunity to really focus on how do you nurture students over time? How do you nurture students in the classroom over time? There was another idea where we typically talk about in our structures of one of the solutions we think about in terms of creating spaces that are relationship rich are mentorship. And you offered this wonderful kind of thought around constellations, not one perfect mentor. And I really want to understand when you talk about this constellation being more useful than a traditional idea of assigning every student one mentor, what do you mean by that?
Peter Felten:
Yeah. Well, first I want to say I’m a big fan of traditional mentoring and one-on-one mentoring is great. It’s powerful. It’s affected my life. I suspect for many listeners, they can think of mentors they’ve had. So it’s not that there’s something wrong with mentoring. There’s a math problem with mentoring though. There’s just too many students and not enough of us. And the good news is, actually, I think there’s two reasons why it’s really helpful to think about constellations of relationships. Some people talk about networks and things like this. In these books, we borrow a phrase from a scholar, Brad Johnson, who talks about constellations, which is, I like the language, partly because it’s sort of neutral, it’s not businessy feeling or something like this. So lots of different people get it. You can imagine your own constellation and you can form it yourself, you put the pieces together.
So two things about constellations. One is that the research is really clear that students benefit from having multiple people in their lives who can support them and challenge them, advocate for them, validate them, guide them in different ways, that one person rarely can do all of that for a student, especially as they go through their education, they evolve and change and all this. So a constellation, having a set of different people can support and challenge students much more richly than a single person ever possibly could. And then secondly, from our perspective, the one who’s going to be the mentor or in the constellation, being a holistic mentor to someone over multiple years, that is hard.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
It’s hard.
Peter Felten:
There’s all of this thing about personality matches and time and difficulty and all this. And I’m trained as a historian, if you have mental health issues, I want to be empathetic. I am not your counselor. If you’ve had financial challenges paying for school or something like this, I wish you as well as I can. I should not be giving you financial aid advice. So in a really important way, recognizing that students need a constellation of relationships helps us be kinder and more realistic to ourselves. I’m here to help my students make academic progress, to help them think about research, to think about their future and their careers and all this, and then I’m here to help them make connections that can do other things for them.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
But I’m not a one-stop shop, right?
Peter Felten:
But I’m not, and I don’t have to be. And this can be really hard for faculty especially because many of us, like you said before, we spent a long time earning PhD and developing really deep expertise, and we’re comfortable in that role of expert and recognizing some of the limits of our expertise, but also recognizing how that frees us up a little bit to say, “I don’t know how to do that. Let me help you connect with financial aid office. Let me help you connect with whoever.”
Dr. Cristi Ford:
So I think that in theory, those may be listening say yes. Yes, in theory we get it. Yes, in theory, that is why other offices and departments have been devised and created on campuses. But how can institutions maybe double down in helping students build these constellations? Because as you know, some students arrive with more social and cultural capital. Some students, they’re first generation students or they’re rural learners. There’s all adult learners who haven’t been back in the classroom for many years. So what can institutions do to really help students get this?
Peter Felten:
Yeah. Well, I mean, this is going to sound like a cop out. We need to educate them about it. I mean, we’re in the business or in the field of educating people, so we need to help students recognize that relationships are going to be helpful for them in college and after college. They’re going to help their wellbeing, they’re going to help their academic success, their professional success, all those sorts of things, and that they’re capable of building these kinds of relationships because often you see first-gen students who are really good at doing things on their own, or you see students, I don’t know, who are parents and working. I don’t have time for this.
Peter Felten:
It sounds great, but I don’t have time for this. And so we’ve got to be realistic and create opportunities where students who have those kinds of obligations can connect really meaningfully, and then we have to teach them that this matters and that you can do it. And the heart of the challenge, I think, for institutions is we have to make classrooms relational spaces. That is the one place. Whether these are online classes, in-person classes, hybrid, in between, our classes are the one place we have all our students. It’s the one place they can’t say, “I’m too busy.” Well, they can, but we can let them. And so how do we help them build educationally purposeful relationships in our classes? And I think that’s the heart of the challenge for institutions.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Gosh, it’s such the heart of the challenge because we have so much prioritization on SLOs, outcomes for the courses. We have content that we have to teach. We have all of these priorities for accreditation, assessment. And so also creating space for relational pieces I think is going to be really, really critical. And I think as we go through this, I’m going to ask you towards the end of this conversation, give you a call to action of how folks are listening and thinking this is all well and good, but how do I do this one thing a little bit better? But before we go there though, you said something that was, this was the mic drop moment for me, Peter, when we were together. You offered an important challenge to a common assumption. You’ve already talked about mentors being this numbers problem, but you talked about one-on-one faculty relationships being difficult to scale, but peer relationships being scalable.
And you put students into groups doesn’t necessarily mean you create these meaningful connections and learnings, but what must educators think about when they’re designing, teaching, and modeling so that peer relationships become what you called, I think is the relationship accelerator is what you said.
Peter Felten:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and the term, I really appreciate you picking up the term relationship accelerators, because my colleagues and I, when we were writing for students, there’s all these phrases we use in higher education when we’re talking to each other, high impact practices and other pedagogies and things like this. And it’s like, we cannot say to students, this is a high impact practice. They don’t know what that means. They don’t care what that means. And so it’s like, well, what’s a term that makes sense? And where we landed is that if you think about something like group work in a class, like an internship, like mentored research, all of those things, one of the core parts of the way they work is they put students into deep or potentially deep relationship with other people, with peers, with great things. So one of the things we’ve got to do is we’ve got to design really good relationship accelerators.
We can’t just say, “Go get an internship, good luck.” Or we can’t just say, “Get into groups, figure stuff out.” We’ve got to draw on and design. But the second thing we’ve got to do, and I think this is particularly true with group work, is we’ve got to recognize students bring assumptions and experiences into our classes and into our work. And so I’ve interviewed a ton of students. They hear group work, they roll their eyes. They’ve had bad group work experiences.
And so I don’t think we should concede that just because students have had bad group work experiences, we’re not going to do group work. What we’ve got to do is design really effective ones and then help students understand that there’s things they can do to make this productive, to make this constructive, to make it equitable so everybody’s sharing the load and things like this. So we really have to talk to students about the value and purposes of group work. And I joke with my students, I don’t know that they like it, but I’m like, dudes, life is group work. You don’t get to choose who you’re working with all the time. You don’t get to… So it’s like the kinds of struggles, the kinds of processes we’re going to use here, they’re going to build skills and capacities for you as well as knowledge that’s really powerful, but you’ve got to commit to it.
So creating space and opportunity and the rationale for doing it and recognize that people are going to be skeptical, but they can get over it.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
That’s so good. Again, that relationship accelerator and just the ability to scale those peer relationships in very meaningful ways, it gave me a whole new meaning and an additional passion to really start thinking about that more holistically in ways when I talk to institutions. But for those who are listening, they may easily think that we’re talking about how this work could maybe conclude with an individual faculty member that needs to just maybe simply care more, wait for the pause. But what we know is these relationships exist within systems and systems determine where people have time and permission and support to connect. So what do institutions maybe misunderstand when they treat relationship building as a matter of individual personality or goodwill or something to do off the side of the deck?
Peter Felten:
Yeah, this is so important and I want to be super clear. Individual action is necessary, right? It’s the foundation, the stories I told, the stories you’re thinking of, they all are rooted in individual action, but it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. In fact, there’s a really big study that came out of University of Southern California, this book from 2023 called Creating a Campus-Wide Culture of Student Success that was a six-year study of the three public universities in Nebraska and looking at low-income first-gen students there. And what they found is that if the institution relies on individual action to support these students, students are going to fall through the cracks. It is inevitable. But if you have a culture, if you have systems, not just nice people and bespoke programs, if you have cultures and systems that validate students, then you can support and challenge and help all of your students thrive.
So the question is, how do you do this? And back to interviews, we interviewed this amazing person, Denise Bartel from Kent State University for a new project, and she had this phrase that I love. She said, “We need to recognize that relationships are not one more thing we do. They need to be how we do all the things we do.”
So this is central to our work. It’s not when you were talking about SLOs and assessments. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s not one more. It’s how we do it all. And the good news is if we think about systems and cultures and how do we build systems and cultures that are fundamentally relational, what the research shows is that when you’re successful doing this, you create something like a virtuous cycle. So what that means is that students come to believe that this institution, this program, this is a place where we help each other. This is a place where everybody can thrive. And when you believe that, you act in ways that are educationally purposeful, that are really helpful, that help you connect, that help your peers connect in all this. And when your students are acting in ways that are educationally purposeful, that are connecting with you and each other in really meaningful ways, and as a faculty member or staff member, your job is easier and more joyful.
And so the challenge is to really think about this as cultural work and how are we building a culture that is deeply relational?
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love this, and I love that the relational is central and core and not happening adjacent or to your point, one more thing, but really getting really clear about that. So I’d love to hear from you as a professor of history and assistant provost of teaching and learning at Elon, as educators are listening or leaders are listening and saying, “Yes, we agree with everything that’s been said, but there are time constraints, there are class size constraints, there’s institutional capacity.” Maybe what’s one call to action? What’s one practice you could ask them to begin and then repeat?
Peter Felten:
It’s going to sound too simple, but the fundamental practice is talk to each other about relationships, educational relationships. So talk to your students about why you do this, why you’re teaching class, why you design the program this way, why you want them to connect with each other. Talk to your colleagues about how you are helping students build these kinds of relational skills. So for example, students may be bad at group work in the first course they take in your program. By the third or fourth course in the curriculum, they ought to be pretty skilled at group work. They’re not going to do that if we don’t talk to each other about how are we doing this and how can we do this together? So I think we really just have to keep it on the agenda, both of coffee talks and informal chats, and also on the planning and strategic agenda.
How are we doing Things intentionally to build systems and cultures that are more relational.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I agree with that, talking to each other. But I think the other piece that you said is the last piece of that, that I particularly agree with, and I said this team when we met, we measure institutions what matters. And so where do we find evidence of this commitment? How do we think about making these conversations around relationship building central to student success? Where are there metrics that we can put in place as an institution to measure those things? I think those are the places that will really serve an institution well to your point of building this capacity and culture around relationships.
Peter Felten:
And we’ve got to have metrics where students tell us when do they feel connected? Where do they feel connected? To whom? And then where are the gaps? And how do we build on the assets we have and try to work through the gaps?
Dr. Cristi Ford:
So I will say to you, and this has been such a great conversation, I could talk to you for another 45 minutes or so, but I know we want to make sure we provide links to the books that you’ve talked about. But I have been starting to wrap up episodes where I ask guests to finish a sentence. And I guess as I’m listening to you here, I’d love to ask you to finish this sentence. A relationship rich education becomes possible when we what?
Peter Felten:
Connect every day with at least one person. Commit to connect.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
That’s good. That’s good. Peter, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the great collaboration at the Innovation Series. Shout out to LSU for having us. Is there anything else as we wrap up today that you’d like to share with our audience as we close out here?
Peter Felten:
Well, I would just like to say that this conversation’s focused on my work. Cristi, your work is really impressive and inspiring and aligned with this. And so I hope as a podcast host, maybe someday you turn the microphone around and interview yourself. I think there’s a lot you have that all of us should be lying.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
I appreciate that. Peter, thank you for the time. Thank you for joining us, and thank you for helping us kick off this next season of the Teach and Learn podcast. My
Peter Felten:
Pleasure.
Dr. Cristi Ford:
What I appreciate about this work is that it does not reduce relationships to kindness alone. It asks us to design learning environments in which people are seen, appropriately challenged, invited to contribute, and connect to others who can help them imagine what is possible. Peter, thank you for helping us move relationships for something we hope happens to something we intentionally make possible. And thank you to our dedicated listeners and curious educators everywhere. Remember to follow us on social media. You can find us on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook at D2L and subscribe to the D2L YouTube channel. You can also sign up for the teaching and learning email list for the latest update on new episodes, articles, and masterclasses. And if you’d like what you’ve heard, remember to rate it, review and share this episode and remember to subscribe so you never miss what we’ve got in store.
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Dr. Cristi Ford:
And remember to hit that subscribe button. And please take a moment to rate, review, and share the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Until next time, school’s out.

Resources Discussed in the Episode

• Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Student Success, (2020, Johns Hopkins U Press)
• Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship Rich Education (2023, Johns Hopkins U Press)
• Creating a Campus-Wide Culture of Student Success (Routledge, 2023) — this is the 6-year student of students at the public universities in Nebraska — by Hallett, Kezar, et al.
• Time, Care, and Connection (College Teaching, 2026) is a new article by a former student and me that analyzes ~2000 faculty perspectives on effective classroom practices and barriers to relationships in their classrooms