Sitcoms love to making fun of the trust fall. You know, where the protagonist has to go to an over the top team building activity only to be dropped their team during the trust fall, nobody reaches out to catch them. It’s funny because it’s uncomfortable, it’s funny because every joke like this has a small grain of truth to it… doesn’t it? Building a strong team means building a strong level of trust. A student, a teacher, a classroom, a school, they are all part of a team that operates best when everyone knows they will be caught when they fall.
A student deserves to feel trusted at school. What does that look like? A community that welcomes them every day no matter what. A community that believes that they can learn. Students who are part of a classroom community that has an opportunity for everyone to participate. A classroom that trusts looks like students who are empowered to take charge of their learning, explore interests, and become teachers themselves. A community that looks at them and sees what they can do instead of what they can’t. Students learn to trust when they hear, “I missed you when you were gone, you are important to our community.” It sounds like, “I know this is hard but I can work with you.” Trust whispers to your students, “I know you can do this, I believe in you.” Students who are caught when they fall hear, “I know you are an expert at this, can you teach me about it too?”
A teacher deserve to be on team that trusts. A teacher’s colleagues trust them to do the work they said they would do, whether it is preparing for a lesson, bringing the food for the potluck or keeping important things confidential. Colleagues trust a coworker who is honest. A community of trust is built when teachers greet each other in the hall, ask after others’ well being, look on with curiosity and not judgement, talk with honesty and talk to people, not about them.
A school that is built as a community of trust has teachers on co planning teams, working together, bringing students’ work and saying, “I tried this and look what happened!” or “Help. how did you do that math work and get everyone so successful?” Collaboration looks like choosing a power standard, talking about strategy and skill implementation, and bring back results to analyze and decide next steps.
In a trusting community, these are our students, not mine and yours. Our collective goal is their success. In a community like this teachers are willing to try different things to help all of our students. A school like this might try a block of time where every student is getting some type of intervention (What I need time WIN). To make WIN time work, teachers trust other teachers, outside of their grade level teams to instruct students in small groups. Teachers collaborate around what will be taught and how. Teachers trust students to move around the building. During a community wide scheduled intervention time like this, there is collective trust that these are our students and we believe they can succeed.
A school that is built around trust, is built one trust fall at a time. Imagine what could be built in our community of trust. Imagine what we could try to move students toward higher success.
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