Relational trust and positional power between school principals and teachers in Chile: A study of primary schools

Abstract

The article analyses the trust relationship between principals and teachers in primary schools in the specific Chilean educational context. The analysis is based on the concept of school trust, emphasizing Bryk and Tschannen-Moran’s classic works. A mixed sequential quantitative–qualitative research methodology is used, including both a survey and a qualitative case study carried out in nine schools. The main results, include: principals and teachers take a different approach when forging trust they have in one another. While principals confer this trust, teachers earn it. Likewise, principals mainly set the tone, intensity and scope of the trust relationship; principals are more critical of teachers, mainly questioning certain aspects of their professional skills. Conversely, teachers normally base trust on more personal matters; individual traits of both principals and teachers have little impact on their relational trust, the exception being the number of years teachers have been on the job. While for teachers there are hardly any differences (and this changes only when it comes to the prevailing principal’s leadership), among principals, differences emerge from schools’ size, socio-economic level and public or private status; and a final discussion propounds the importance of the educational context when analysing trust relationships and positional power in schools.

Building Trust: Reflections of School Principals Working With Students, Parents, and Teachers in an Intensive Language Training Center in Beijing

“…Trust facilitates the development of productive social relationships for school improvement and teacher collaboration, parent involvement, and student engagement in learning in the high-power distance school context (Li, Hallinger, & Walker, 2016). Trust between school principals and teachers could cooperate to make school successful and also makes the parents involved in the school activity (Cosner, 2009) and encourage the student to develop their learning outcomes (Crane, 2020;Weinstein, Raczynski, & Pena, 2020;. Creating a trust learning environment could promote the educational core values of benevolence, honesty, loyalty, and openness to both achieve school targets and school learning outcomes (Weinstein, Raczynski, & Pena, 2020).…”

Overrepresentation of immigrants in special education. A grounded theory study on the case of Austria

“…Schools are no stranger to challenging power relations (Weinstein, Raczynski & Pena, 2018). Hence, the power structure is an important construct to understand school settings and the relationship between parents, teachers, students, or school directors.…”

“…Trust is a key element that keeps several components in schools together (Tschannen-Moran, 2014). Schools with weak trust relationships would not have cultivated an atmosphere of, or achieved improvement (Weinstein et al, 2018). Van Maela, Forsyth and Houtte (2014) found that the trust relationship is higher in the ethnically homogenous schools and lower in culturally diverse schools.…”

“…To build trust, meeting the expectations of stakeholders is required. As Weinstein et al (2018) discussed, meeting the expectation requires actions based on competence. In this study, the distrust was mainly related to competencies.…”

“…School directors and the school inspector were especially critical of teachers' competencies and practices. Weinstein et al (2018) suggested that people with more power focus on professional competencies. In this study, the asymmetric power was not necessarily leading to a weak trust of school directors in teachers.…”