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Trust has been identified as key to students’ academic improvement. The purpose of this paper is to identify the conditions that build trust in teachers, both towards their colleagues and school leaders, and to explore the emotions triggered among these participants. This study uses the critical incident technique to conduct interviews with 34 teachers from the Valparaíso Region (Chile). Results show that incidents are easily remembered when a subordinate relationship is involved. Many critical incidents are related to situations in which teachers are particularly vulnerable. Hence, teachers value the treatment received and support provided. The arrival of new teachers to a school is crucial when building bonds of trust. Benevolence is the facet that stands out the most in incidents reported by teachers and school leaders, while satisfaction is the most recurrent emotion. In the case of school leaders, benevolence is closely followed by competence. In the case of teachers, benevolence is followed by honesty, openness and competence. In this case, the associated emotion is affection.

The development and role of trust in school performance has been built primarily on educational research in the United States. The problem is that the resulting theory of trust may not accurately reflect the development and role of trust in schools in other global contexts. Researchers broadly agree that the implications of trust dynamics filter into every segment of the school's organization. However, trust is often either oversimplified or made to seem overly complex, whereas reality is likely somewhere in the middle and depends largely on specific national and regional circumstances. The resulting problem for school administrators globally is a lack of role clarity regarding their leadership responsibilities related to trust and school performance.

This chapter examined the relationships between organizational justice, organizational trust, and organizational citizenship behaviors in Turkish secondary schools. Specifically, the study investigated whether, and to what extent, organizational justice and organizational trust predict variation in the organizational citizenship behaviors of teachers. A survey research methodology was employed in the study. The sample included 466 secondary school teachers in Kutahya, a city in western Turkey. The study adopted pre-developed respective scales for gathering the data. The data gathering instrument of the study incorporated the Organizational Justice Scale (Hoy & Tarter, 2004), the Organizational Trust Scale (Yılmaz, 2006), and the Organizational Citizenship Behavior Scale (DiPaola, Tarter, & Hoy, 2005). Analysis of the data through the use of hierarchical multiple regression analysis yielded a significant effect of organizational justice and significant effects for two of the three types of organizational trust. There is a positive and moderate level relationship between organizational citizenship on the one hand, and organizational justice, trust in the principal, trust in colleagues, and trust in stakeholders on the other. Predictor variables are ranked in terms of the size of their effect on organizational citizenship as trust in colleagues, trust in the principal, trust in stakeholders, and organizational justice. Organizational justice is a significant predictor of organizational citizenship behavior when considered in isolation, but becomes insignificant when organizational trust is controlled for. Organizational trust and organizational justice explain around two fifths of the total variance in organizational citizenship behavior.

Purpose – Organizational and work studies consistently find an interrelationship between employees' relationships with coworkers to their morale, as indicated by their satisfaction and commitment levels. This same research shows organizational climate, as indicated by levels of trust and shared values and norms in the organization, strongly benefiting from satisfied and committed employees.Methodology/approach – This chapter concretizes workplace relationships using multipanel network data from 15 Indianapolis charter school teachers.Findings – With these data, network traits related to network cohesion, strong ties, and in-group identity identified as central processes undergirding affective relationships are directly tested. A feedback loop between organizational climate and employee morale, where both mutually reinforce the other, is also discussed.Implications – These findings show that affective relationships with coworkers improve employee morale and organizational climate.

The role of parental involvement in their child’s education and academic success has been widely acknowledged in recent educational theories, policies, and practices. Parental beliefs and expectations concerning their child’s learning and success have been shown to be reflected in the parents’ involvement in their child’s education and their practices with their offspring, thereby shaping the child’s motivational development in school. In addition, parental trust in their child’s teacher is a key factor in enhancing the home–school partnership and in supporting a child’s academic motivation and successful schooling. However, political, economical, and technological changes in society and uncertainty about the future may present several challenges for raising children in the twenty-first century. The aim of this chapter is to present recent theories and empirical research focusing on the role of parental beliefs, expectations, and trust in their child’s teacher in supporting children’s interest in learning, self-concept of ability, and achievement behaviors in the challenging and unpredictable future. We will also reflect on how the changing world and uncertainty in society may influence parental beliefs and expectations in their child’s success.

Staff turnover may have important consequences for the development of collective social resources based on trust, shared norms, and support among school professionals. We outline the theoretical role-specific consequences of principal and teacher turnover for features of principal leadership and teacher community, and we test these ideas in repeated teacher survey data from a sample of 73 Los Angeles elementary schools. We find evidence that principal turnover fundamentally disrupts but does not systematically decrease relational qualities of principal leadership; negative changes for initially high social resource schools offset positive changes for initially low social resource schools, suggesting that relational instability “resets” the resources that develop in the relationships between leadership and teachers. Greater consistency in measures of teacher community in the face of teacher turnover implies that the social resources inhering in the relationships among teachers are more robust to instability.

This chapter argues we should not regard school-to-school collaboration as simply a mechanism for outcome-driven improvement but rather consider the establishment of teacher relationships as the necessary priority when building highly effective collaborative networks. By revisiting the research of Sandra Kruse, Amanda Datnow and Andy Hargreaves, we develop an additional tool to Hood’s matrix of regulation and cohesion in an effort to position collaborative networks in the context of international private fee-paying schools. The tool visualizes the collaborative network development as a relationship continuum in which time is the necessary driver of a network’s success. The 12 Asian private international schools in the case study were given collaborative framework guidance drawn from multiple sources. Subsequently, the enablers and hindrances reported by the collaboration leads highlight the need for trust and teacher agency development to be prioritized by leadership. Finally, on sharing some lessons learned from the case study, we close by arguing the value of collaboration lies in opening the door to allow for agenetic cultures that build reflexive practitioners.

In this chapter, I focus on two methodological issues involved with conducting ethnographies of very young children; establishing a researcher role in preschool classrooms while simultaneously gaining access into children’s culture and the trust of adult gatekeepers involved (i.e., teachers). Drawing on my participant observation experiences in 10 preschool classrooms (over 470 hours and 19 months of observations), I challenge the use of the friend role (Fine & Sandstrom, 1988) and least-adult role (Mandell, 1988) in research with young children. I examine how teachers mediate the researcher’s role in participant observation of children in preschool classrooms demonstrating the importance of establishing a middle manager role between teachers and children when conducting participant observations. I also discuss strategies used to overcome adult’s mediation of the researcher’s role, and strategies for simultaneously gaining teachers and children’s rapport in participant observation research in ways that formulate positive relationships with adults and children. I demonstrate the importance of researcher reflexivity of children’s and adults’ assessments of researchers’ roles in the field, highlighting how researchers’ impacts on children are not dependent on the times they are present in the field. Instead, I show that children continue to critically assess researchers’ positionality and roles in the field, often times seeking the help of adults (i.e., parents and teachers), further stressing the need for researchers to negotiate an understanding of their roles with both adults and children prior to and while in the field.

Teachers leave the profession for various reasons, such as inadequate pay, work demands, and lack of support from their administrative leaders. Hargreaves (2004) attributed the growing teacher burnout phenomenon to accountability pressures in the forms of high-stakes testing and increasing work demands. This stress can result in teacher's low self-efficacy and the perception of workplace alienation. Seyfarth (2008) described an alienated teacher with the “feeling that one's work is meaningless and that one is powerless to bring about change” (p. 198). Administrative leadership can further inhibit a teacher's professional growth by failing to meet the teacher's needs with respect to instructional coaching and lacking opportunities for professional self-reflection.