Connection Catalysts: Future-Ready Teaching Strategies
The Connection Catalyst Collection
The Connection Catalyst Collection is a set of teaching practices and learning activities that make human connection a pathway to learning. Each one is designed to develop the future-ready skills students need, foster a culture of integrity from the inside out, and support the wellbeing of students and faculty alike.
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Future-ready skills
Students practice the human-centric capacities that employers name as essential and that generative AI is least able to transform.
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A culture of integrity
When coursework asks students to bring back what they heard, noticed, and valued, integrity grows from motivation and identity rather than surveillance.
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Wellbeing for students and faculty
Connection counters isolation. Learning that runs through relationships sparks intrinsic motivation, connection, and relevance for students and, as a byproduct, returns the relational heart of teaching to faculty (Felten & Lambert, 2020; Pacansky-Brock et al., 2022; Pugh, 2024).
Explore the collection
Each practice includes a rationale, learning outcomes, a step-by-step structure, modality guidance, and assessment ideas you can adapt to your discipline.
- Conversations Across the Curriculum Students hold structured conversations with people in their lives and communities, then analyze what they learned through the lens of course concepts.
- Learning Dedication Students dedicate their learning in your course to someone who matters to them, then share that dedication with the class.
More practices and activities will be added to the collection.
Why human-centric skills, and why now
Three findings from the World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum’s New Economy Skills: Unlocking the Human Advantage (2025) defines human-centric skills as the capabilities that allow individuals, organizations, and societies to adapt to change and lead transformation. Once dismissed as “soft,” these skills are now, in the report’s framing, a hard currency of the labor market. Three findings matter for teaching and learning:
- They endure. The report’s analysis of generative AI’s capacity to transform skills points to the lasting value of human-centric skills relative to digital ones.
- They are expected but rarely named. Employers project creative thinking as one of the fastest-growing skills through 2030, yet it is among the least mentioned in hiring. Only 72% of U.S. job postings explicitly name even one human-centric skill.
- They are in short supply. Employers rate curiosity and lifelong learning as the weakest workforce proficiency in every region.
These skills are valued, but they are often assumed rather than deliberately taught. Meanwhile, the everyday conversation and connective labor through which people learn to see and be seen by one another has grown scarcer, for students and instructors alike (Pugh, 2024; Turkle, 2015). Relational capacities are in high demand, resistant to automation, and fragile enough to require intentional practice. College courses can be where that practice happens.
Human-centric skills and the conditions needed to foster them
Trust, mattering, and belonging, and the four skill categories built on them
The World Economic Forum groups human-centric skills into four categories. None of them grow in isolation. They take root where three conditions are already present: trust, mattering, and belonging.
The foundation: trust, mattering, and belonging
These conditions come first. Without them, students are unlikely to take the relational and intellectual risks that human-centric skills require. With them, students feel validated and are more likely to be their authentic selves and achieve their full potential (Rendón, 1994).
- Trust
- Students judge that their instructor and peers are sincere, reliable, competent, and genuinely care (Feltman, 2021).
- Mattering
- Students feel noticed and important to others, and sense that their absence would be felt (Schlossberg, 1989).
- Belonging
- Students feel accepted, valued, and connected to a learning community as their authentic selves (Pacansky-Brock et al., 2022; Strayhorn, 2018; Walton & Cohen, 2011).
Built on that foundation, four categories of human-centric skills:
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Creativity and problem solving
- Creative thinking
- Analytical thinking
- Systems thinking
- Mathematical and statistical thinking
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Collaboration and communication
- Empathy and active listening
- Leadership and social influence
- Speaking, writing, and languages
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Emotional intelligence
- Motivation and self-awareness
- Resilience, flexibility, and agility
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Learning and growth
- Curiosity and lifelong learning
- Teaching, mentoring, and coaching
- Dependability and attention to detail
Human-centric skills are learned in relationship.
Most of the human-centric skills in the New Economy Skills report develop through an ongoing process of interacting with other humans and coming to know one’s own values. They cannot be downloaded or completed. They are practiced, with other people, over time.
How the collection supports faculty
Four kinds of learning that connection makes possible
The practices and activities in the Connection Catalyst Collection help faculty think through how to foster human connection as a pathway to four kinds of learning. Together, they help shift the question students carry from “What do you want to do?” to “Who do you want to be?”
- Learning about oneself
- Conversations with others surface what students value, where they come from, and what they care about. Understanding someone else’s story is often how students first put words to their own.
- Developing critical AI literacy
- Placing a human conversation beside an AI-generated response makes the qualities of human connection visible by contrast. Students sharpen their judgment about what AI can and cannot offer, and when to use it.
- Centering diverse ways of knowing
- Families and communities hold deep reservoirs of knowledge and expertise (Moll et al., 1992). Connection Catalysts invite that knowledge into the course as a legitimate source of learning.
- Creating a culture of integrity rooted in moral identity
- People act with integrity most consistently when being honest and caring is central to who they are (Aquino & Reed, 2002). Work grounded in students’ relationships and values makes integrity an expression of identity rather than an act of compliance.
References
- Aquino, K., & Reed, A., II. (2002). The self-importance of moral identity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1423–1440.
- Feltman, C. (2021). The thin book of trust: An essential primer for building trust at work (2nd ed.). Thin Book Publishing.
- Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-rich education: How human connections drive success in college. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & González, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141.
- Pacansky-Brock, M., Smedshammer, M., & Vincent-Layton, K. (2022). In search of belonging online: Achieving equity through transformative professional development. Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 12, 4.
- Pugh, A. J. (2024). The last human job: The work of connecting in a disconnected world. Princeton University Press.
- Rendón, L. I. (1994). Validating culturally diverse students: Toward a new model of learning and student development. Innovative Higher Education, 19(1), 33–51.
- Schlossberg, N. K. (1989). Marginality and mattering: Key issues in building community. New Directions for Student Services, 1989(48), 5–15.
- Strayhorn, T. L. (2018). College students’ sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students (2nd ed.). Routledge.
- Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming conversation: The power of talk in a digital age. Penguin Press.
- Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331(6023), 1447–1451.
- World Economic Forum. (2025). New economy skills: Unlocking the human advantage [White paper].