Trust in the Classroom

Has anyone every accused you of having poor communication skills? Have you ever faced a wall of silence as you stood at the front of the class waiting for one of your students to venture an answer to your question? Our lack of verbal expression is seldom a reflection of an absence of thought, reflection, ideas. So what forces us to maintain our silence?

TRUST

Our edchat conversation last week considered how we can help at risk kids. Although the word at risk means different things in different environments, caring and trust were brought up as means of helping at risk students attain success. I think that caring and trust helps ALL students achieve success. Steve Barrone, who led my school through our mission statement development last week stated that trust requires four elements to exist:

• reliability
• openness
• collaboration
• caring

For me, reliability and caring at the big ones. As a child, I trusted my parents to keep me safe but we didn’t engage in much collaboration. They also weren’t very open with me about the ways of the world. To my way of thinking, collaboration and openness are required in some instances (e.g. between colleagues or between supervisors and their staff) but reliability and caring are always essential.

As a high school student

• I didn’t trust my guidance counselor because she didn’t care about me.
• I trusted my math teacher because he was reliable. He cared enough to pick me up on the way to school when the bus couldn’t make it down my road on snowy mornings.
• I didn’t trust many of my friends because they gossiped and engaged in backbiting.
• I did not trust my English teacher because she took my story and said that she would submit it to be published. It was MY childhood story and she never gave it back. I always wondered what happened to it.

Now,

• I won’t be open with administrators who gossip because that shows that they are unreliable.
• I don’t trust systems that are not transparent or edicts that drift down from above without my input.
• If I feel that someone doesn’t care about me, I won’t trust them with anything that’s important to me; they may discard it too easily.

Do students trust teachers who do not care about them?
Can trust exist in the absence of openness between teachers and administrators?
Can our students trust us if we prove unreliable?
Will our students trust us if we silence their voices?

I think that trust is an important element in the classroom. We’re asking students to try, to think, to express themselves, to challenge themselves, to reach, to dream. They need to be able to trust us, to know that we won’t give up on them if their course changes, or if their goal does, and know that we’ll help them through their failures.

What do you do in your classroom to ensure that your students trust you?