| Evidence continues to mount from myriad studies as to the importance of social trust as a key facilitating factor in advancing and sustaining school reform. However, the educational literature provides very little guidance on how schools---particularly chronically under-performing schools plagued by low levels of trust---ought to work on developing trust in order to improve teaching and learning. Utilizing data from a sample of Accelerated Schools, Success for All schools, and comparison schools from the Study of Instructional Improvement (SII), this study investigates the extent to which growth in relational trust among teachers occurs in concert with these models' design and implementation strategies, and explores the factors related to their instructional improvement processes which are most related to change in trust among teachers. When considered in tandem with other recent SII findings, this study's findings suggest that trust may be a sufficient but not necessary condition for the improvement of instruction and student achievement. Furthermore, several aspects of the instructional improvement process were found to be related to change in teacher-teacher trust across all samples of schools: collective responsibility, critical discourse among teachers, and climate of innovation and risk-taking. Faculty stability and depth of policy implementation were also found to be related to teacher trust in both of samples of intervention schools. |
