Teachers shouldn’t have to worry about their pupils not trusting them. Teachers may not be liked, of course, but when it comes to doing the things that engender trust, they tend to score highly.

“There are three elements of trust and we sometimes refer to them as ABI,” explains Michele Williams, an expert in trust and an assistant professor at Tippie College of Business, the University of Iowa.

“A is for ability. So, in the classroom, is a teacher confident? Do they have the ability to teach? Usually, teachers rate very high on that measure.”

The second letter, B, is for benevolence. As Williams explains: “Students will ask themselves, ‘Does my teacher care about me? Are they looking out for my best interests?’”

The last letter is I, which represents integrity: “So [pupils will think] does a teacher follow a set of rules and guiding ethical principles that I agree with?”

In most cases, Williams says, teachers will be performing very well on all of those elements. “They’re dedicated, they want to help children, they care about them. It’s a high-integrity profession,” she says.

However, every teacher has, at some point, has gone through the experience of either a student or a class appearing to lose trust in them.

Sometimes it’s down to the teacher not quite hitting the standards required in the ABI areas. But sometimes it’s out of their control. “[There is a myth that individuals who are trustworthy] will never do anything that harms me - they’ll never have glitches,” Williams says. “But in reality, people, including teachers, will make mistakes and students will make mistakes, too.”

In short, teachers may lose the trust of their class by simply being a normal, fallible human. Teachers might also suffer a loss of trust for a reason unconnected to anything they have or have not done. Outside of the school environment, a child might have been brought up not to trust people for any number of reasons, including racism, sexism or fear of authority.

“Children may have grown up in a community where adults of a certain gender or race might not be seen as trustworthy and [pupils] might come into that [student-teacher] relationship with some suspicion,” says Williams. So, even if a teacher hits all three of the ABI requirements, they could still find themselves a month into term facing a class or individual who doesn’t trust them. And that’s not good news.

Without trust, learning is pretty much impossible. A child can’t feel safe, won’t follow directions and won’t be motivated if they don’t trust the teacher.

So you need to fix it. But that’s tricky.

Let’s start by tackling the myth that trustworthiness presents as perfection. Trying to conform to this to ensure you get the trust you need is not the sensible choice. “Trust is built in how you deal with mistakes, not by being perfect all the time,” says Williams.

Mistakes are inevitable, she explains, so to ensure those buying into the perfection myth don’t use those errors against you, you need to concentrate on transparency: “Going back, admitting when you made a mistake, showing that willingness to be vulnerable to the other person and also in just listening - trust can be rebuilt like that.”

The added benefit of this is that you are modelling a more realistic form of trust, eroding the myth with every mistake (and apology) you make.

Next, what if you actually, for whatever reason, don’t score highly on Williams’ ABI scale? You might be tempted to ride it out or put it down to an off day and move on. But if the incident was bad enough to cause an individual or group to lose trust in you, that’s not going to cut it - you need to get your best apology ready, says Michael Haslip, assistant professor in the school of education at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

“If I needed to rebuild trust and have a new start, I would start by calling a classroom meeting…and I would give a really honest and sincere apology to the children in order to role-model how to rebuild trust,” he says, “not because I’m going to humiliate myself, but because [it’s important to be that] role model.”

Being obstinate and blaming the pupils won’t get you very far, he adds: “When trust is broken, somebody needs to make the first move to rebuild that trust through communication.” And if you don’t do it, no one will.

Haslip says the apology must be followed by a clear description “of how we’re going to build our community and treat each other differently, including the teacher treating the children differently”.

“That begins with our language,” he explains. “I would talk with the children about the type of language that we’re going to use. Because one of the primary signs or symptoms of a lack of trust in a relationship is that we don’t speak courteously to one another. There’s tension and conflict in our voice and the way the words that we use become sharp and harsh and punitive and demeaning. If, for example, someone is yelling at somebody, criticising them or being very sarcastic, that language has to change.”

He says that certain changes to your classroom can help rebuild trust, while also guarding against future loss of trust.

“It’s all about how to create a positive classroom by adopting these positive relational principles,” he says. “For example, one of them is the ‘choice principle’, where if a child is doing something that you don’t want them to do and you need them to do something different, you give them two positive choices as alternatives instead of just saying, ‘Stop doing that.’”

He cites a book, 101 Principles for Positive Guidance with Young Children: creating responsive teachers (Pearson, 2012), as a source of many more strategies that teachers can add to their toolbox to create “a positive classroom that is no longer punitive”, and one that is more conducive to building trusting relationships.

“The idea is to switch from a discipline-focused or punishment-focused approach where you’re reacting to children’s misbehaviour, to a more proactive approach where you’re praising children for doing the right thing, catching them being good,” Haslip says.

You have to be careful with this approach, though, to avoid it becoming a permissive or erratic environment, for example, where you risk losing control. “Teachers, of course, are adults - so they know [they] can’t treat everyone the same,” says Williams. “They have to treat everyone equitably.”

Some children come to school without their homework “because they have a very difficult family situation”, she explains, “and the teacher is taking that into account”.

Teachers should be aware that other children in a class might perceive favouritism, and that in turn could lead to a lack of trust in the relationship. To counter that, students should be able to voice their concerns and seek explanations where possible.

“It’s very easy for the students not to voice their concerns unless the teacher is creating a really open, psychologically safe environment that you can say what you’re really thinking, and one where the teacher is not going to get defensive,” Williams adds.

But what about those pupils who arrive in the classroom already predisposed to mistrust you? A big part of dealing with that is proving they’re wrong.

“A teacher may have to make extra effort to show that they care about the student and that they are not a threatening person,” says Williams. “I don’t think it’s something that can’t be overcome, but the more the teacher understands that every single child in their class may not be seeing them the same way and may not be seeing them the way they see themselves, [the better].”

So trust is delicate, easily manipulated and hard to keep hold of - but it can be managed by a teacher if they do the hard work to earn it. And that effort will be worth it. If there’s one thing you can trust in, it’s that trust pays off in many positive ways in the classroom.

Chris Parr is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 2 October 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…Trust”