Teacher-Student BFFs? Using Multiple Tech Tools to Improve Interpersonal Academic Relationships

Teachers and students rarely become good friends. They don’t divulge secret hopes, they don’t send text-messages to meet for coffee, and they don’t disclose personal struggles with each other. They keep to professional distance and communicate in patterns focusing on topics related to course material. Beneath this seemingly mutually agreed upon social arrangement, both novice learners and skilled instructors recognize an understated need for somehow becoming better acquainted on a more interpersonal level:

• Students need teachers to offer suitable career advice, craft personal letters of recommendation, and be willing to serve as a reference on a student’s evolving resume.
• Teachers need their students to work as trustworthy research assistants, write letters of support during tenure review, and provide an evaluation of a professor’s teaching ability that is open and honest.
• Both students and teachers learn more deeply when they become more aware of personal contexts that influence another’s thinking.

All of these tasks inherently require knowing a person socially to some degree.

To serve these critical functions in any useful capacity, teachers and students must undeniably form deeper social relationships beyond the scope of a limited classroom interaction. Yet, multiple barriers inhibit the social development of teacher-student friendships...

See the rest of this post in my guest contribution at the Techniques in Learning & Teaching (TILT) blog.