Collective Trust: Why Schools Can't Improve without It

Citation

Holzman, S. (2012), "Collective Trust: Why Schools Can't Improve without It", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 50 No. 2, pp. 255-257. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231211210611

The silver bullet has been shot and educators have seen that there is no easy answer to ensure that student outcomes are positive. Making schools more efficacious is not a new topic in the professional literature, nor is the topic of trust. However, when the concept of trust is traditionally discussed, the focus is usually trust issues between the administrator and the teachers. This narrow view of trust does not take into consideration the larger context in which schools reside, and therefore the arenas in which trust must be studied.

Collective Trust: Why Schools Can't Improve without It is unusual in a number of ways. First, “the book's authorship is a collaboration of three generations of researchers – from Wayne Hoy to his student, Patrick Forsyth, to his student Curt Adams” (Forsyth et al., 2011, p. xiii). As Barbara Schneider, a noted authority on trust writes in the foreword, “This intergenerational quest for understanding and documenting the value of collective trust has built an integrated and cohesive argument for why policymakers and practitioners need to pay closer attention to trust in schools” (p. xii).

Second, Collective Trust: Why Schools Can't Improve without It not only discusses the issues of trust, but emphasizes in order to be effective schools must go beyond interpersonal trust “trust that a single individual has for another” (p. 20), but must include collective trust, “ a group's willingness to be vulnerable to another party based on the confidence that the latter party is benevolent, reliable, competent, honest, and open” (p. 48) and that this occurs as a result of multiple social interactions.

Forsyth, Adams, and Hoy admit that the book is not written to be an “airport” minute‐manager. However, the tone and style make their arguments, insights, synthesis, and ideas easy to follow. The many figures and charts support the written narrative. Each chapter ends with a clear summary of key ideas and concepts. The authors also support the reader in that they provide a guide to how to use the book, e.g. practitioners might skip Chapter 3, which is about the measurements of collective trust. They provide a road map for the reader by stating the three learning objectives early on (p. xiii):

1. 1.

   to provide educational researchers and other scholars with a sound theoretical framework and a set of reliable and valid measures to study collective trust;

2. 2.

   to bring together the considerable cumulative empirical evidence about trust in schools and begin to integrate and make sense of it; and

3. 3.

   to provide practitioners with a set of tools to evaluate the trust culture of their schools with an aim toward school improvement.

Part I “Foundations of collective trust” has three chapters which focus on the early research and empirical findings on trust in schools, the conceptual foundations of collective trust, and how this is measured. This section, along with all others, is heavily researched and puts into context what education has learned about trust and its effect on schools. It is this section of the book that the authors emphasize, and the research supports, that the referents for trust go beyond the individual to the group (p. 48) and include:

• •

  Faculty trust in principal.

• •

  Faculty trust in colleagues.

• •

  Faculty trust in clients (parents and students).

• •

  Parent trust in school.

• •

  Parent trust in principal.

• •

  Student trust in faculty.

• •

  Student trust in principal.

Part II of the book “Research on collective trust” delves into the empirical evidence for support of the author's concepts that when an organization has collective trust positive outcomes occur. This section includes five chapters:

1. 1.

   the antecedents of collective trust which includes both the internal and external context;

2. 2.

   the consequences of collective trust;

3. 3.

   collective trust and school effectiveness;

4. 4.

   collective trust, control, and leadership in schools; and

5. 5.

   collective trust as a condition of social capital and academic optimism.

It is in this part of the book that the authors present the evidence as to why collective trust can positively affect student achievement. They also suggest that collective trust is just one leg of the reciprocal relationship along with collective efficacy, and academic emphasis. “All three of these collective properties are similar in both nature and function and also in their potent and positive effects on school outcomes, especially on achievement” (p. 90). Using research as the basis for their ideas, the authors easily convince the reader that trust among all the constituents (faculty, administrators, parents, and students) is one of the most important components of a school's culture. The research also demonstrates that it is the “faculty trust in parents and in students (that) turned out to be a single unidimensional aspect of collective trust: when the faculty trusted parents, the faculty also trusted students and vice versa” (p. 99).

Part III of the book “Practice and synthesis” has two chapters. In the chapter entitled, “Education policy and collective trust,” the authors emphasize the human aspect of trust. If trust is built through relationships, then regulations, policies, and autocratic/top‐down decisions need to be revisited as they do not promote trust, but in fact may inhibit trust among groups, especially between teachers and the administrators. As the authors state, “our assumption changes the fundamental purpose of education policy from control over teachers to support for conditions that enable human and social capacity to flourish” (p. 152). They provide four guidelines in which policies should be viewed.

Initially, it appears that research is mixed as to the effect trust in the leader has on outcomes. However, as suggested in the last chapter, “The practice of school leadership and collective trust” when the research is reviewed from the context that schools are complex systems with complex tasks and interdependent groups, then there must be trust in the leader in order to be efficacious. In addition, organizational citizenship behaviors, the behavior of teachers, are another link to build trust. These behaviors include: helping behaviors, sportsmanship, organizational loyalty, organizational compliance, individual initiative, civic virtue, and self‐development.

The authors end the book Collective Trust: Why Schools Can't Improve without It by reviewing the nine key concepts teased out of the empirical studies, and highlighted in the book. It is from these generalizations that future leaders may gleam important ideas as to how to structure their work. Rather than focusing on the task, it is more important to focus on the relationships in order to build the trust among each constituent of the system. Instead of working independently, each group within a school must build trust and become interdependent. Through these efforts, all benefit especially the students.

Overall, Collective Trust: Why Schools Can't Improve without It is an important book for current and new leaders – especially those who understand that the “way we do business” now is not working for our current students and teachers and are seeking a new paradigm in which to rethink our schools. The summaries at the end of each chapter, and the epilogue – which presents the generalizations presented – should be read by everyone. These ideas will make the entrepreneurial leader question what and how current work might be done differently in order to achieve the most from the hard work of the people at school.