Academic Senate for California Community Colleges on Collegial Relationships

Julie Bruno, et al. open their article by stating the importance of educators working together in order to bring together change initiatives, creating a unified vision of how change initiatives fit together, and to ensuring their collective success. Working together, in turn, requires trust and goodwill.

This article is helpful in claiming that collegiality—esp. a culture of trust and mutual respect—are necessary for the success of what is a transformative moment for California Community Colleges. The authors suggest a number of individual actions meant to improve collegial relationships. I believe our next steps should be to take these ideas and extend them from individual action to institutionalized policy.

citation: Julie Bruno, Sylvia Dorsey-Robinson, Irene Malmgren, Julius Sokenu, and John Stanskas. “Transforming the Culture: Working Together to Benefit Students.” Senate Rostrum (Acad. Senate for California Community Colleges quarterly newsletter). March 2016. 17-18. http://www.asccc.org/content/transforming-culture-working-together-benefit-students

Carolina Riveros-Ruenes on the Power of Vulnerability

In these blog entries I have described trust, for the most part, as a characteristic of interpersonal relationships that develops when individuals exhibit vulnerabilities to their colleagues, and their colleagues reciprocate by exhibiting their own vulnerabilities. I have argued (implicitly, at least) that expressing vulnerabilities is a cause that leads to trust as an effect. Not only that, but in this description, the cause is of secondary importance to the effect, which is of primary importance. In short, cause-vulnerability (secondary importance) leads to effect-trust (primary importance).

Carolina Riveros-Ruenes approaches this formulation a little differently by emphasizing the primary importance of vulnerability. Her blog entry focuses on the difficulty of trusting one’s colleagues—especially when engaging in any form of sharing of teaching or pedagogy (e.g., observations of others’ classes, sharing student work, etc.).

She claims that working through the vulnerabilities created by sharing with your colleagues is important for your students’ sake, and that the act of doing so makes you a stronger teacher.

She offers advice for working through those vulnerabilities and argues that doing so develops trust between colleagues that can extend to other work throughout your educational institution.

citation: Carolina Riveros-Ruenes. “The Power of Vulnerability in Professional Development.” Edutopia. 1 November 2016. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/power-vulnerability-professional-development?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Jerome Cranston on Relational Trust

This article reports the results of a survey of school principals about trust between professionals in educational institutions. Although my sabbatical project is less concerned about the opinions of grade school principals, there is some food for thought in here that can be translated to community college institutions.

Early in the article Cranston describes three types of trust. The first is organic trust: trust based upon a belief in the moral authority of an institution. The second is contractual trust: trust based upon mandatory obligations. The third, and most pertinent to me (and also the main subject of this article), is relational trust: trust based upon social exchanges and social relations between institutional members.

While structural elements (e.g., implementing student success programs) are necessary to create institutional and student success, relational trust is the “glue required to cohere teaching staff to a common purpose”. In short, relational trust is a necessary precondition for the success of implemented programs.

Relational trust is not created by a program, however. It forms when individuals within the institution create norms of safety, risk-taking, and change orientation. Relational trust is not mandated; it is fostered, built, and sustained.

citation: Jerome Cranston. “Relational Trust: The Glue that Binds a Professional Learning Community.” Alberta Journal of Educational Research 57.1 (Spring 2011): 59-72.

Anthony Bryk & Barbara Schneider on Trust in Educators’ Relationships

According to Bryk & Schneider, trust arises from the role obligations people agree to uphold within an institution; we watch our colleagues’ actions and infer, from those actions, the level of trust we will grant to them. (In almost all of the articles I’ve read about trust in educational institutions, these two ideas are common: trust builds when educators uphold obligations, and trust builds when educators demonstrate and reciprocate vulnerabilities.)

Bryk & Schneider then describe elements of trust (respect, personal regard, role competence, and personal integrity). They then also explain some of the benefits of developing trust (achieving buy-in for change initiatives, reform efforts likely to move broadly across the institution, and supporting a moral imperative to work on institutional improvement).

As a side note: many of the discussions I’ve read about developing trust, developing respect, or developing collegiality focus their attention on administrators developing trust with faculty, or faculty developing trust with students (and, in the case of K-12 education, with parents). These trusting relationships tend to extend across boundaries from one group to another group.

These articles seem to focus less attention colleagues developing trust with each other; with trusting relationships within a group (such as faculty trusting other faculty). This is an area that needs more research, and it’s an area I can see myself devoting more attention to.

citation: Anthony S. Bryk & Barbara Schneider. “Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for School Reform.” Educational Leadership 60.6 (March 2003): 40-45. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar03/vol60/num06/Trust-in-Schools@-A-Core-Resource-for-School-Reform.aspx

Cori Brewster & Jennifer Railsback on Building Trusting Relationships between Education Colleagues

Trust arises from individuals fulfilling obligations with each other: individuals share vulnerabilities with each other (i.e., when one expresses vulnerability and the other shares back vulnerability of their own). This statement is not a definition of trust but it does illustrate the main condition that must exist for trust to form.

Trust may not translate directly into improved student achievement, but it creates the conditions—both structural and socio-psychological—that make positive changes possible. Without trust, programs meant to improve enhanced student achievement are not likely to take root or be successful.

Brewster & Railsback suggest a number of steps educators and institutions can take to improve trust between colleagues:

• Engage full faculty in activities and discussions related to the schools’ missing, vision, and core values.
• Make new teachers feel welcome.
• Create—and support—meaningful opportunities for teachers to work collaboratively.
• Identify ways to increase and/or improve faculty communication.
• Make relationship-building a priority.
• Choose a professional development model that promotes relationship-building.

Lastly, building trust means avoiding a couple of missteps. First, it’s not enough to merely create opportunity for trust-building; the institution needs to take active steps to actually create it. Second, trust-building won’t happen as the result of a “program” to build trust; instead, actively “re-culturing” the institution is the only viable alternative.

citation: Cori Brewster & Jennifer Railsback. “Building Trusting Relationships for School Improvement: Implications for Principles and Teachers.” [Portland, OR:] Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (Education Northwest), Sept. 2003. http://educationnorthwest.org/sites/default/files/trust.pdf