Despite decades of research and billions of dollars spent per annum to promote at-promise student—that is, low-income, first-generation, and/or racially/ethnically minoritized students—college success, at-promise students continue to be retained and graduate at lower rates than their traditionally college-going peers. The purpose of this study is to investigate how faculty coordinators in the Thompson Scholars Learning Community (TSLC) facilitate and integrate instructors into the program’s ecological validation which has been found to promote at-promise student success. This study is framed by the ecological validation model of student success in conjunction with a systems theory perspective of faculty roles to investigate how TSLC’s faculty coordinators support instructors to engage in high-quality interactions with at-promise students. This qualitative multiple-case study utilizes 56 semi-structured interviews with faculty coordinators, TSLC program directors, and TSLC instructors, as well as observations and documents, from three University of Nebraska campuses to triangulate its findings. Results indicate the importance of the mesolevel role faculty coordinators play in both students and instructors’ ecologies. Three primary ideas emerged. First, faculty coordinators helped bridge instructors to campus and program resources which promoted attentiveness to student needs, the adoption of validating teaching practices, and grew instructor affinity with the program. Moreover, faculty coordinators helped departments understand the program and its students which empowered them to assign good instructors. Second, faculty coordinators helped align instructors’ personal, practitioner, and professional goals with their teaching in the program by working with instructors and departmental leadership to contextualize instructors’ work within TSLC as promoting student success, professionally developing, and beneficially for the department. Third, faculty coordinators influenced instructor pedagogy by encouraging validating teaching practices, demonstrating validating approaches, and serving as single points of contact for instructors. As single points of contacts for instructors, faculty coordinators were able to promote attentiveness to student issues by distributing the responsibility for supporting students across the students’ mesolevel—that is, throughout the program, their other instructors, and campus resources. Results also indicate potential avenues for how institutions can structure supports for instructors to scale TSLC’s ecological validation, including the creation of single points of contacts for instructors, the creation of validating incubators, and the importance of linking trainings with mesolevel supports.

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The teacher-student relationship is multidimensional and fluid. This is especially true for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Educational leaders in the public school setting cannot control which students enroll at their school sites. The only thing teachers, as educational leaders in K-12 public education, have complete control over is the environment they create in their classrooms. Among those student groups most reflecting few gains on state and federal reports of proficiency data are students who typically come from backgrounds besieged with challenges or from historically underserved and marginalized communities. In this transcendental phenomenological study, the phenomenon investigated was how secondary teachers described their experiences in building relationships with students identified as at promise. A secondary public school setting was the focus of this study. The intent of this study was to understand the essence of the lived experiences of teachers as they described their experiences in building relationships with at-promise youth. Teachers must leverage themselves in the quest to form positive and strong relationships with their students. In shifting the adverse narrative about the political identity used to categorize these students, the antipathetic mindset related to these students in public schools too shall shift. Research has demonstrated that at-promise students respond best in school settings that provide a culture where teachers intentionally construct a caring interaction laden with respect and recognition. It is important to foster agency in at-promise students through the understanding of the social, political, and economic structures that served to impact their generational past, inform their present, and prepare their future. This research study focused on the complex dynamic of the teacher-student relationship. This research investigation connected the important role teachers play in the lives of their students, teacher mindset about at-promise student success, and how strong and positive teacher-student relationships have the potential to encourage agency in at-promise students through meaningful recognition of their promise for academic success over their presupposed risks. This study’s findings highlight the critical need for teachers to create intentional opportunities to foster strong teacher-student relationships with at-promise students.