Relational Trust in Schools: One School-Wide Philosophy

Q: What is relational trust in schools?

Relational trust in schools refers to the confidence members of a school community develop in one another through their interactions and responsibilities. Researchers Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider describe relational trust in terms of respect, personal regard for others, competence in core responsibilities, and personal integrity. It develops through repeated everyday interactions among school leaders, teachers, students, families, and other members of the school community rather than through a single program or initiative.

Q: How is relational trust different from a classroom management plan?

A classroom management plan establishes expectations, routines, procedures, and responses to behavior. Relational trust concerns the quality of the relationships through which those expectations and directions are communicated and experienced. Strong teacher-student relationships can influence how students respond to classroom expectations, but classroom management outcomes also depend on factors such as instruction, consistency, student needs, classroom conditions, and available supports.

Q: Who is responsible for building relational trust in a school?

Relational trust is built through interactions among multiple members of a school community, although different roles carry different responsibilities and influence. School leaders can shape organizational expectations and working conditions, while teachers build trust through relationships with students, families, colleagues, and administrators. Research by Bryk and Schneider on Chicago schools identified principal leadership and relationships among school participants as important parts of developing relational trust.

Q: Can one teacher build relational trust without support from administration?

An individual teacher can build trusting relationships within a classroom and with colleagues even when broader organizational support is limited. Building relational trust consistently across an entire school, however, generally requires participation from leadership and other members of the school community. Shared expectations and common language about respect, competence, integrity, and professional relationships can help make trust-building an organizational practice rather than the responsibility of a single educator.

By Jon Konen, Last Updated: September 3, 2026

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Relational trust in schools is the confidence that colleagues, leaders, students and families will do their jobs and follow through on what they say. Bryk and Schneider identified four parts: respect, personal regard for others, competence, and integrity. In their study of Chicago elementary schools, higher-trust schools were more likely to improve.

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What Relational Trust in Schools Actually Means

Researchers use the term relational trust for something teachers already recognize: the everyday sense that the people around you will do what they said they would do. Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider built the framework out of a long study of Chicago elementary schools, and they split it into four parts.

Respect - actually listening to what colleagues, families, and students say, instead of waiting for them to finish.
Personal regard for others - stepping past what your role strictly requires when somebody needs it.
Competence - doing the job well enough that other people can plan around you.
Integrity - saying and doing the same thing, week after week.

Bryk and Schneider put principles at the center of the first two. A leader who admits what they do not know, listens to a concern without getting defensive, and avoids arbitrary decisions sets a tone the rest of the staff copies. A leader who does the opposite sets one too.

What the Chicago Research Found About Trust and School Improvement

Bryk and Schneider followed 400 Chicago elementary schools over several years. In that sample, schools with stronger relational trust were about three times more likely to improve on the measures of school improvement the researchers tracked.

The finding has limits worth stating. Trust by itself does not fix a weak curriculum or a schedule that gives teachers no time together. What the researchers reported was that schools with weak relational trust were much less likely to show improvement on the measures they studied.

The spread between the top and the bottom of their sample was wide. In the highest-trust quarter of schools, about three-quarters of teachers reported strong relationships with other teachers and nearly all of them reported the same about their principal. In the lowest quarter, most teachers reported little or no trust in their colleagues, and two-thirds said the same about their principal.

None of that is something one teacher installs across a building alone. What a teacher does control is which habits they bring to their own room and their own team, which is where a school-wide philosophy earns its keep.

PU #52 - School-Wide Philosophy

By this point in the year I have watched plenty of us hit a wall, and some of the kids who struggle most in our rooms have hit one too. Office referrals go up. What was tolerable in the fall starts to feel like a nuclear situation at critical mass. You find yourself scratching your head and wondering, "Where was this in November?" I have caught myself doing things in April that I would not have done in October.

Other colleagues in the same building seem to hold their stride. They are smiling, laughing, and planning activities that get their kids moving up and down. Their discipline stays about as consistent in April as it was in September, and they treat their instructional planning as connected to how students behave. When I have asked them about it, what they keep coming back to is the relationships they have built with students.

Where did they learn to work that way? A school-wide philosophy can support that kind of teaching! I would recommend these three things that all teachers can read, experiment with, and dialogue with colleagues about...High Trust, Growth Mindset, and Learning to Leave Our Ego at the Door!

High Trust

Denny McLoughlin's High Trust Philosophy gives strategies and starts conversations on how we can talk with kids, colleagues, parents, and even our own families. All this work is based on building trusting relationships. One valuable strategy for working with resistant kids is offering choice...two things that we can live with, and then let the kid make the choice. In the High Trust framing, letting a student make that call can give them a sense of agency, which may make cooperation more likely.

Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck's work with Growth Mindset changed how I think about change and challenge. Setbacks are part of the work, and how a student reads a setback matters. A growth mindset, as against a fixed mindset, is the belief that a person's abilities can develop through learning, strategies, effort, and support rather than being fixed from the start. Dweck's research connects that belief with how students respond to difficulty.

Leaving Our Ego at the Door

Leaving our egos at the door sounds like an easy task, but being flexible with our thinking when stress and student chaos are at their height is a major task! Our impulses tend to guide our quick decision-making process, which may lead to inaccurate and false accusations. A great article written in 2010 titled Classroom Management Strategies for Difficult Students: Promoting Change Through Relationships, by Mary Ellen Beaty-O'Ferrall, Alan Green, and Fred Hanna, makes me think about all the times when my ego got in the way of making the best decisions for the kids I work with. I noticed I was reacting hardest to particular students, and that my own frustration was doing some of the driving. Students displaying challenging behavior can have all kinds of reasons for it, and reading it as a personal test of me was mostly my ego talking. I learned to slow my reaction down rather than hand it over. My new kung-fu/jujitsu attitude checked my ego at the door...and knock on wood...calmness and understanding reign!

Basing our beliefs on philosophies, especially on a mixture of philosophies such as the ones mentioned above, helps us understand who we are as a human being, who we are as a teaching staff, who we are as teachers. I believe this helps us then determine our pathways and journeys with our kids, parents, and colleagues!

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is relational trust in schools?

Relational trust is the confidence members of a school community have that the others will do their jobs and act consistently. Bryk and Schneider describe it as resting on respect, personal regard for others, competence, and integrity. It is built through ordinary daily exchanges rather than through a program or an initiative.

How is relational trust different from a classroom management plan?

A management plan is a set of procedures and consequences. Relational trust is one of the things that can shape how students respond to those expectations and to teacher direction. Whether a given plan works in a particular classroom depends on many factors, and the strength of the teacher's relationships with the class is one of them.

Who is responsible for building relational trust in a school?

Everybody, but not equally. The Chicago research puts principals at the center because their behavior sets what the staff treats as normal. Teachers carry it in two directions at once, toward their students and toward their colleagues, and the teacher-to-teacher side is often the harder of the two.

Can one teacher build relational trust without support from administration?

Within their own classroom and grade-level team, yes. Across a whole building, no. That is the practical case for a shared philosophy: it gives a staff common language for what trust looks like, so the work does not depend on one person holding the line by themselves.

Four parts, not a feeling - Bryk and Schneider define relational trust as respect, personal regard for others, competence, and integrity.
Three times the odds in one study - in the Chicago study of 400 elementary schools, higher-trust schools were about three times more likely to improve on the measures the researchers tracked.
An organizational resource, not a prerequisite - the Chicago findings associate relational trust with improvement rather than establishing it as something every school must have before it can improve.
The adults matter too - in the Chicago sample, teacher-to-colleague and teacher-to-principal trust separated the top quartile of schools from the bottom.
A shared philosophy can provide common language - High Trust, growth mindset, and checking your ego are examples suggested here, not findings of the Chicago research.

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