Many students in higher education feel alone. They don’t know that everyone else is feeling the same fears—of failure, of disappointing their families, of not being enough.
As educators, we balance course content with the added complexities students are bringing into the classroom. And we often do so without formal training in psychology, counseling, or crisis management. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
This past year, I made a point to focus on connecting with students by reframing my approach to assignment feedback to prioritize connection rather than evaluation. And it transformed student outcomes: Students began the semester intimidated, overwhelmed, and uncertain and ended it confident, empowered, and validated. This approach also transformed my own sense of purpose and agency.
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Despite all that feels out of our control, I learned that connection is possible in higher education, even with large class sizes and a handful of hours a week with students.
Why connection matters
The feeling of belonging is one of our three basic psychological needs. The more I read, the more evidence I found that making connection a priority would enhance the educational experience, rather than taking time away from content.
Relationships built on safety, respect, and trust, also known as secure attachment, help us build confidence, empathy, resilience, agency, and more. Attachment theory is grounded in the parent-child relationship. But the foundational ideas for developing secure relationships are beneficial in the classroom, too: understanding students’ emotional states and underlying needs, more deeply understanding their behavior through curiosity and empathy, validating their thoughts and experiences before correcting them, and problem solving together.
Leading with connection can be more work upfront. But our brains are not as receptive to logical processing and higher-level thinking when they are flooded with emotion. By validating and empathizing first, educators make room for meaningful learning.
Empathy and connection can also disarm the isolation and powerlessness that many students feel because they’re afraid of not meeting familial, social, cultural, and other external expectations about who they are supposed to be, how they are supposed to act, and how they are supposed to feel about their next steps.
But the question remained—how could I build authentic, secure relationships in only an hour or two a week?
Connection through reflection
In practice, it’s not always easy to prioritize relationship building when faced with logistical constraints. I teach a one-credit career development course for 60 biology undergraduates and a two-credit version for graduate students, and I advise hundreds more. The idea of connecting meaningfully with each student felt impossible.
In my undergraduate course, I had just 12.5 minutes of individual in-class time per student over the entire semester. That’s less than one minute per week. In higher education, we’re often dealing with large class sizes, multiple sections, or multiple classes in the same semester. There are very concrete limits to the time we have to connect with each student.
But I kept returning to psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s words: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
I began to see that even with the constraints of a 50-minute class and 60 assignments a week to grade, I had choices. I could choose to use those moments intentionally. I realized that feedback on assignments could be a powerful tool for connection.
In previous semesters, assignments were milestones—ways to track progress. This past year, instead of using assignments solely for evaluation, I treated them as conversations. I scaled back the requirements to allow students time for meaningful reflection, and I responded to each submission with personalized comments.
After learning about a particular topic, like “Communicating your unique strengths” or “Setting goals that feel achievable,” I invited students to reflect starting with an open-ended prompt. For example: What changed about your understanding of goal setting, career barriers, or your career journey in general? (one- to two-paragraph reflection).
They could choose to reflect on:
- What was unique, surprising, insightful, memorable?
- What don’t you want to forget?
- What prior (mis)conception did you have about the topic and how/why did that change?
- How has this inspired you? Do you have any new ideas, next steps, actions you’re excited about as a result?
In sharing how their understanding of the topic had changed, students reflected on what was most meaningful to them. They imagined new possibilities for their futures, and they integrated insights from the topics into how they were articulating their own value as individuals. They shared deep and meaningful parts of themselves.
I wanted to meet that level of trust and vulnerability with authenticity in my responses. So I responded to each submission with personalized comments.
Sometimes it was a question to deepen their reflection: “What do you think it is about patient care that pulls you so much? It sounds like it’s not just about making an impact because you can do that in a lot of different fields. That level of specificity will be really helpful later in your applications!”
Other times, I shared my own experiences with doubt or failure: “I 100% agree about being nervous about being a bother!! I do the same thing with my mentors and always have to remind myself how excited they are to help.”
Often, it was an affirmation of their insights or celebration of their accomplishments: “It sounds like you made the most of the summer research program. Keep up the great work!”
These comments weren’t usually long, but they were personal. They said: I see you. You matter. You’re not alone.
Letting go of evaluation, gaining engagement
Replacing half of my concrete, evaluation-based assignments—that I had been using for years—with open-ended reflections was not an easy decision. It meant giving up control in a time of increased uncertainty. It was also completely different from any of the other advanced STEM class assignments my students were used to.
Yet letting go of evaluation didn’t lead to disengagement, poorer performance, or chaos. It led to deeper engagement. Over time, students began to talk about themselves differently. Their reflections became more cohesive and confident. They could articulate how their values and experiences would shape their careers. I saw their agency grow.
By the end of the semester, we all agreed on scaling back the total number of reflections, but there was no question about their worth. One student wrote, “I particularly like the reflections because I see how my confidence was growing with each entry.”
It also created opportunities for conversations that would not have happened otherwise. One of my quietest students approached me in the fourth week and apologized for not responding to my comments in the grader. She wanted to make sure that I knew how much she appreciated the comments and that she always intended to reply. Another sent me an email several months after the semester ended to share how the class had helped him secure a certified medical assistant position that was a crucial part of his medical school application, and that the reflections helped to clarify his goals and present himself more confidently as an applicant.
“I greatly appreciate the time you took each time to respond to each of our weekly [reflections]. I took each piece of advice seriously and did my best to incorporate it into future assignments. I feel as though the structure of the class set me up for overall success and gave me a strong foundation for applying to medical school.”
In my case, many of the students’ reflections and my comments were focused on growth and identity in the context of career. The content isn’t what matters, though. Starting each conversation with curiosity and a willingness to learn builds the foundation for a deep and meaningful mentorship. That can happen at any level and with any topic.
Depending on what class and what age of students you are teaching, you might focus on what makes them curious or sticks in their brains. Or you might dig deeper and ask them to share what their biggest barrier is.
On the first day of each of my classes, I have students write their biggest career fears on a bright red piece of paper. Then, they throw their fears into the middle of the room. As soon as the crumpled papers leave their hands, there is a palpable shift in energy—a giddy relief throughout the room. We write their (very anonymous) fears on the whiteboards. Walking around the room, seeing that the fears others have are not so different from their own, the atmosphere transforms.
Seeing the humanity in others helps us accept our own humanity. When we share our challenges and needs, the uncertainties we are all facing become more manageable. This sets the tone for the semester. Even better, I don’t have to guess at what the students need to start building connections. They tell me what matters most to them. All I have to do is listen.
The cumulative impact of small connections
By the end of the semester, over 96% of my students reported feeling more confident, knowledgeable, and prepared. Based on surveys, they increased in all 14 aspects of career readiness, including communicating their goals, skills, experiences, and values.
Most meaningful to me, though, was that the seemingly small changes in how I responded to student assignments and framed the course did make an impact. Students felt like someone saw their value.
One student wrote, “Thank you for always leaving comments on my work! It empowers me and makes me feel that my experiences/voice is valid.”
At the end of the semester, another student wrote, “Christina, you’ve always done an amazing job of making me feel supported and more confident about where I am. I’m so glad I took this course.” Yet another wrote, “You have definitely eased my anxiety tenfold when it comes to the whole job application/interview process.”
A personalized comment on a reflection is a seemingly small act. But by making that an intentional choice rooted in how I wanted to make an impact on the world, it became meaningful. It was my chance to show the students the value they bring to the world and that their voice matters. Every time that I prioritized this authentic connection, I felt my own agency grow.
As educators, we have more control than we think. And that’s incredibly empowering.
