The Trust Imperative: The Foundation of Fearlessness
By Douglas Reeves
November 2, 2021
When is the first time that you can recall being in a high-trust environment? Perhaps it was early in your career when colleagues and supervisors encouraged you, forgave your mistakes, and gave you a sense of confidence that allowed you to forge ahead to launch your career as an educational professional and make a difference for your students. Perhaps it was even earlier, when a teacher helped you break the bonds of perfectionism, encouraged you to try something new, and then encouraged you through the inevitable mistakes that accompany the risk-taking endeavor we call learning. But I would like to suggest that your first experience in a high-trust environment was much earlier.
How Babies Trust – and Learn
Healthy infants learn that they can rely on parents and caregivers to respond to their needs. As Berkeley psychology professor Allison Gopnik notes, babies are natural hypotheses testers, with nearly every action an attempt to explore whether the desired result – feeding, changing, playing – will follow. Infants continue this relentless exploration as they learn to walk and talk, making innumerable mistakes along the way. If most adults made as many mistakes as toddlers, they would give up long before they could cross the kitchen floor. Why? Because adults have been conditioned to fear mistakes, while babies relish them. Adults are fearful; babies are fearless. The very heart of the fearlessness that characterizes learning from infancy through adulthood is the bone-deep belief that our mistakes are the essential path toward learning. Babies trust their parents to forgive those mistakes. Adults fear that every mistake is a source of humiliation and embarrassment.
Why is Trust So Important?
In Fearless Schools, I outlined four essential consequences of a high-trust environment: learning, morale, impact, and innovation. Without trust, learning is impossible. This is true because an essential prerequisite for learning is error. If we are in an environment where mistakes are not permitted, then we will only show to teachers, parents, and colleagues what we already know. It is as if music students, having mastered the C-Major scale on the piano will, ten years later, continue to play that scale because they fear the mistakes that are inevitably associated with their first attempts at more advanced music. This reluctance to tolerate error is prevalent in adults, including those of us in education. Ask your colleagues, “What about education did you think was true ten years ago that you know is not true today?” When this question was put to some of the world’s most prominent educators, including Howard Gardner and Richard Elmore, they had no difficulty in filling a book with reflections on their errors. But when I have posed the same question to educators and administrators, the responses range from tentative to non-existent. Some of the things we learned in our first educational psychology classes – such as learning styles theory – have been found to be without any evidentiary foundation, and yet many thoughtful and intelligent professionals continue to value tradition over evidence. This failure to learn by adults has nothing to do with their sincerity and intelligence, but rather with the intellectual environment in many schools that prevents adults from acknowledging error.
Trust and Staff Morale
Staff morale is undermined at every turn in a low-trust environment. Why is it that in staff meetings, colleagues who have important contributions to make remain silent? It is a good bet that when they offered an idea in a previous meeting, they were shot down. Perhaps their idea was appropriated by another more vocal person in the meeting. Or most likely, they offered an idea that, upon further reflection, required reconsideration and improvement. One thing is certain: In a profession that is dedicated to lifelong learning, the surest way to destroy morale is to make adult learning, and the mistakes that are necessary to learn, an unsafe act.
Trust and Safety
The impact of trust can literally be a matter of life and death. Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson’s ground-breaking work in hospitals revealed that in a low-trust environment, medical errors are more common, leading to higher death rates and longer stays in the intensive care units. In order for medical professionals to provide a safe environment, they must be able to admit mistakes and thereby enable the entire hospital staff to learn from those mistakes. If a surgeon has spent half a century being the smartest person in the room without any challenge from anyone else, then it’s not an environment in which mistakes, however deadly, will be challenged. Tragically, the same fearful environment in the cockpit of passenger airliners has led to catastrophic pilot errors, unchallenged by subordinates.
Trust and Creativity
Creativity and innovation depend upon trust because creators must operate in an environment in which mistakes are not only tolerated, but welcomed. Yet despite the elegies that are offered to support creativity, many schools unintentionally undermine creativity by praising students who “get it right the first time.” Yet one would be hard-pressed to find the first draft of a novel that had literary merit, the first attempt at a painting that hangs on a museum wall, or the first attempt at a symphony that moved an audience. Creativity depends upon trial and error, and the willingness to try and fail requires a high-trust environment.
Building Trust in Your School
Building and maintaining trust requires that the leaders at every level, from central office and building leaders who set the direction for effective instruction and observe classrooms, to teacher leaders who mentor their colleagues, understand the value of mistakes. Consider this common scenario. The administrator walks into the classroom and the teacher, wanting to show mastery of the curriculum and the classroom, is delighted to see that students have eyes on the teacher, are diligently taking notes, and quickly volunteer with the correct answer when the teacher poses a question. I can think of many times as a teacher when this placid picture of perfection would have been very appealing. I like quiet and well-behaved students, and I especially like to have my supervisors see my safe and orderly classroom in which my students consistently demonstrate that they have learned because they always know the answers. What’s wrong with this picture? This is a zero-trust environment. I didn’t trust the students to make a mistake, so I carefully call on students who I know have the answers. I did not trust the students to construct knowledge in a variety of ways, so I carefully orchestrated the manner in which they took notes, copying from the board and filling out prescribed worksheets. This classroom is the illusion of learning and exhibits the absence of trust.
Contrast this to the high-trust environment in which students confidently – even joyfully – make mistakes. You can see this in the kindergarten class in which students giggle as they learn, and the teacher provides encouragement and support with every breath. You can see this in the music classes in which every wrong note begins a cycle of instant feedback, correction, and the instruments and voices blend to strike the perfect chord. The only way that the music teacher can avoid mistakes is for the students to never sing a single note.
The best evidence of trust in the classroom is when teachers are so fearless that they use equity sticks or random calling on students so that everyone has the chance to learn, and that includes making mistakes with the confidence that their errors are part of learning and never a source of embarrassment.
How Leaders Build Trust
Just as the best classroom teachers maintain a high-trust environment by greeting every mistake as a step toward learning, the best leaders conduct meetings that are focused on inquiry, deliberation, divergent thinking, and learning. You know that you are in a high-trust staff meeting when someone says, “I think I was wrong about that,” or “I had never thought about it that way before.” The low-trust meeting is perfectly scripted, with those in authority making presentations while everyone else pretends to listen attentively. Because questions and challenges are unwelcome, both trust and learning are impossible.
Building Trust from the Classroom to the Boardroom
If we expect teachers to maintain a high-trust environment in the classroom, then it is essential that leaders and policymakers model the behaviors that show trust. This means that they welcome questions and challenges, openly discuss mistakes and learn from them, and make it safe for others to do the same. They know that civil discourse involves respectful disagreement. Especially in public forums, these leaders know that trust and respect are essential, and they do not tolerate violations of the boundaries of respect and trust. Leaders like Dr. Mike Wasta, retired superintendent and national leadership consultant, would send out “Oops-Grams” in which he would not only discuss his mistakes but help the entire system to learn from them. This created the high-trust environment that allowed his district to succeed and communicated clearly that this was a leader who trusted the entire community to hear about mistakes without judgment. Perfect leaders – or at least those who maintain the illusion of perfection – will never invite open and honest discussions of mistakes. Perfection is the enemy of trust and learning. And open and honest acknowledgement of error, from the superintendent’s office to the kindergarten classroom, is the foundation of trust and learning.