Can Educators Focus on Connection Rather Than Grades?

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.

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.

Read the rest of this article at Greater Good Magazine. 

Christina Swanson is an Academic Advisor and Director of Career Connections and Alumni Mentoring Program in the School of Integrative Biology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.