Giving Compass' Take:

• The author argues that in order to successfully teach tech in higher ed, teachers must first cultivate strong relationships with students. 

• How can funders support education technology training programs for higher ed professionals?

• Read about how technology will shape the future of higher education. 

During my early days of teaching in graduate school, educational technology was sold more for its posh than performance.

Looking back, the whole enterprise seemed like a fruitless attempt to keep up with the expectations of the smartphone generation. But there has been progress, both with the tools themselves and the teaching practices we employ to incorporate technology into the classroom.

These advancements are worth celebrating, but it leaves me wondering: Why should students still show up to a physical classroom? My answer to that is humans are crucial to inclusive teaching, and that using tech successfully in the classroom starts with relationships.

Pivoting one’s pedagogical focus to relationship-building thus demands a learning process about the self and the students, and there are practical steps an instructor can consider when embarking on this paradigm shift.

  1. Provide opportunities for students to reflect: Student reflection assignments have been shown to produce cathartic effects on academic performance and even health. But what if instead student reflections could be used to capture information about students’ sense of meaning and purpose?
  2. Prepare to learn about yourself and your students: Asking students to reflect in deep and profoundly personal ways means that we need be prepared to listen and learn from it. This learning process is arguably the most difficult step.
  3. Leverage partners. We need not be dwarfed by the enormity of the task of teaching for inclusion. There are many scholars, societies, campus partners, and other groups more broadly engaging and thinking about this work.
  4. Provide opportunities for yourself to reflect: The social and intellectual development that both students and instructors undergo when we discuss and debate ideas is at the center of why we educate.

Read the full article about relationship building by Bryan Dewsbury at EdSurge