My own work on what makes students trust teachers was inspired by an interview that I did with Rachel Forsyth (in the botanical garden shown in the featured image, and half of it was inaudible on the recording due to wind!) for her and other’s study on what teachers do to build trust with students. They published first results in Felten et al. (2023), and now in Sutherland et al. (2024), which I will summarise below.

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Quality assurance at universities is often oversimplified: Single events, captured in indicators that rely on one facet, are met with quick interventions, without any understanding of the complexities of the situation or longer term strategies. This leads to flip-flopping between states, for example getting rid of student group works because students report to not like it, only to reintroduce it when employers note a lack of team-working skills later. Instead, the focus should be on enhancing university culture as a whole, and this relies on understanding a complex system and carefully adjusting variables over time. In this, quality improvement of universities is a wicked problem, i.e. an extremely complex problem that does not have a clear cause or formulation, that will never be “solved”, only dealt with better or not as well, where there is no way to test any of the infinite possible solutions before implementing them, and where the many representations and approaches are all valid depending on underlying norms, values, perspectives, …

Hamshire, Barrett and Forsyth (2024) present a concatenated approach to quality improvement. Continue reading →

Lewicka (2022) investigates how trust in higher education institutions is build (and rebuilt). This is a much broader question than the one that we have investigated, but I recognize many of the elements that we saw in our study, too. I had to redo their figure in order to process it, and here is my summary.

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The assumption that teacher-student relationships are important has been around for a long time and is probably uncontested. But when it comes to describing what exactly makes a good relationship, there is no consensus yet, and many aspects, like a sense of belonging, or the teacher caring, or trust in teachers, have been investigated. Here comes my summary of some of the relevant literature on trust that students have in teachers, and how that trust can potentially be fostered and grown.

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In my series of things-I-want-to-say-in-an-upcoming-workshop-but-suspect-I-might-skip-to-make-time-for-participants’-topics, here one slide about a recent study I did with my colleagues Rachel Forsyth and Peter Persson when we got the chance to ask a question in the student-led “SpeakUp Days” survey at LTH. And it turns out: Student trust teachers who show that they care about students (most typically by asking questions, listening, and responding), and that show teaching skill.

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You might have noticed that I am exploring different concepts of what makes a good teacher-student relationship recently: belonging, caring, and most recently, trust. Why am I not just picking one? Short answer is that teacher-student relationships are really complicated, and those three are only some of the facets that are important, but there is no understanding yet of how they overlap or interact. Below I am writing a review of two articles that show just how many other factors are involved and how complicated it is to understand what’s going on.

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