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Distrust can compromise learning, yet faculty can earn and deepen students’ trust by getting to know their students, demonstrating care for them, and trusting them.

Most faculty can recall building relationships with students that endured long after the course had concluded. And many, if not most, of us perceive ourselves as welcoming individuals whose commitment to student learning and success is not only genuine but also self-evident and tangible. So it can be hard to imagine that students don’t always perceive things the way we do and that many of them—especially minoritized students and those who are first in their families to attend college—initially view faculty with suspicion and even fear.

The way students perceive us matters a great deal because, as Peter Felten and Leo Lambert stress in Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, relationships are the single most important factor in college education.² Equity scholars have long emphasized the need for faculty to cultivate trusting relationships with students. Laura Rendón reminds us that, in the 1980s and 90s, feminist teaching and learning theorists introduced models of connected teaching focused on “building relationships among faculty and students” and on creating “learning communities.”³ Meanwhile, in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, Zaretta Hammond explains the neuroscientific finding that the need to be connected to others is wired into the human brain; it’s a survival instinct. When we are alone or fail to have positive relationships, our brains become preoccupied with scanning our environment for threats—a process scientists call neuroception.⁴ This process can hinder our ability to focus and learn.

Trust, in turn, is key to effective relationships. Stephen M. R. Covey calls trust “the most effective way of relating to and working with others” and “one of the most powerful forms of motivation and inspiration.”⁵ In teaching, trust is the basis for all else, allowing us to challenge students because they know we have their best interest at heart and will therefore support them. In the case of equity-minded teaching, we can’t take trust for granted. Many students from historically marginalized backgrounds join our institutions in a state of distrust based on their experiences with prior schooling and both direct and indirect interactions with large bureaucracies like colleges and universities. Schools may have been sites where these students were disciplined for minor infractions, while their families or loved ones may have had trouble navigating governmental regulations and agencies, including our justice system. Aspects of our identities such as race and gender can also make it more difficult for students to trust us.

Fortunately, scholars have also found that trust is key to advancing more equitable outcomes. Hammond calls it the “secret weapon” of the culturally responsive teacher.⁶ Plus, building trust is not as elusive as you might think. There are concrete steps you can take to earn and maintain your students’ trust. In this unit, we’ll first distill research in this area, including how trust plays a role in democracy, how to establish trust among teachers and students, how our identities relate to trust, and how trust manifests itself in fully online courses. Then, we’ll suggest three approaches to building and maintaining your students’ trust, starting with ways to get to know your students and help them get to know you.