By Ellie Thacker
Photos by Brad Slade
Long before McKay School professor Pamela Hallam was a leader in the BYU Department of Educational Leadership and Foundations, she was a new principal at a Title I school—one that received extra government funding due to a high percentage of students from low-income families.
Even then she was asking herself the same question that drives much of her research today: “How do I help the teachers understand that I believe in them?”
Later, for her doctoral dissertation, Hallam researched trust in the context of education, focusing on the intersection between principal trust, faculty, and other stakeholders. Hallam based her approach in part on the work of researchers Wayne K. Hoy and Megan Tschannen-Moran, who have defined trust as “an individual’s or group’s willingness to be vulnerable to another party based on the confidence that the latter party is benevolent, reliable, competent, honest, and open” (Hoy and Tschannen-Moran, “Five Faces of Trust: An Empirical Confirmation in Urban Elementary Schools,” Journal of School Leadership 9, no. 3 [May 1999]: 189).
“Everything I was learning was immediately applicable in my school,” Hallam says. “I started to realize the things that I had been intentionally doing were things I felt were making a difference in the school and were also building a relationship of trust with the faculty. And that meant a lot to me.”
While a teacher may have the most direct influence on student learning, the principal has an important role to play, Hallam explains. “If I can influence the teachers and the culture of the building, if I can create a culture of trust in that building, . . . it improves the efficiency, it improves the flow, it improves the self-efficacy, and it improves the collective efficacy. And that’s going to impact student learning.”
To increase her faculty’s trust in her as a principal, Hallam interviewed every teacher at her school, asking for openness and honesty as they shared their concerns with her. She made a list of faculty feedback and shared it with them, along with her commitment to make specific improvements.
Hallam reflected, “They could see that I [was] following through on what I heard and what they wanted. They [saw] the reliability; then there was more trust.”
She also created a building leadership team at her school. Faculty and parents on the team could vote on school issues, and Hallam would only vote if there was a tie. “And through that I learned [that] it takes time and patience, and you have to be continually thinking and practicing what you preach.”
Hallam saw the building leadership team as a great learning opportunity for her and her staff. She says: “You know, we felt like we did trust each other, and we were willing to [take risks] because failure was not really seen as a bad thing. It was like, ‘Let’s learn from it. What can we do to get better?’”
Earning her doctorate and joining the McKay School—where she has worked since 2006—did not change Hallam’s focus on principal trust. She has served as dissertation chair for many graduate students, mentoring them in research on various aspects of faculty trust in principals. Tyler Howe, principal of Granger High School, was one of Hallam’s mentees as he pursued his own doctor of education in 2016.
“Principals and educators in general are trained under the belief that relationships are key, and this research is, you know, a very objective view of that,” Howe says. “When you’re talking faculty trust in the principal, you’re talking relationships. So it was, for me, a way to unpack that more intentionally—rather than just saying, ‘I’ll make sure that we’re prioritizing relationships,’ but to actually see what facets of that relationship, what facets of trust, really drive us.”
Howe divided Hoy and Tschannen-Moran’s facets of trust into two categories: the perceived “level of skill” and the perceived “level of will” of the principal. The “skill” included competence, reliability, and honesty, while the “will” included benevolence, openness, and awareness of vulnerability.
Throughout Hallam’s research she noticed that different cultures place higher value on different facets of trust. In Africa she observed that head teachers often value skill-based characteristics more than will-based characteristics. Most of these schools were private schools, which could dissolve if students didn’t show up and pay their tuition.
“They were looking for competency,” she says. “They wanted a teacher who knew their stuff, who could attract the students so they would show up. . . . And that was most important. And then they would work on the relationship. . . . Whereas in the United States, we tend to look at the relationship first.”
Howe adds that teachers must trust a principal’s skill as well as their will. “You know, we can have teachers who trust us very extensively—that we’re kind and that we’re open—but do they really trust our ability or our competence?” he asks. “Both are needed for trust to be as comprehensive and as effective as it can be. And when that relationship gets there, the ability for a teacher and a principal on a team to really affect student learning increases dramatically.”
Hallam and Howe also researched principal and school demographic factors. Howe was surprised to find that there was no statistically significant correlation between the principal or school demographics and overall faculty trust in the principal, except a negative correlation between the principal’s level of education and faculty trust in the principal.
This finding was puzzling, but Hallam suggested, “The only thing that we can think of is when principals say, you know, ‘Call me Doctor,’ that puts space between them and the teachers. And maybe teachers perceive that as kind of a negative thing: ‘I can’t approach you: you’re not as vulnerable.’”
Howe expresses some concern for this negative correlation. “[This was] humorous to me as this was my doctoral dissertation, and immediately I discovered that, well, if this is accurate, am I negatively impacting my faculty’s trust in me?” he says, adding that overemphasis on any kind of title could potentially make principals seem disconnected and “like they aren’t involved in the same work as the teachers.”
Often principals may move on from a school to take a job as a superintendent or other district administrator, Howe adds, which could give faculty the impression that they view leading an individual school as a stepping stone to district administration. Howe himself sees nothing wrong with being a superintendent but says he wants to stay at the building level. “I think the more my actions and my words reinforce that, the less of a risk there is that my increased education strains trust in relationships.”
In the end it’s about building an environment where trust can thrive. As Howe writes in his dissertation, “Teachers are not more effective simply because they trust their principal. Rather, teachers are more effective because of the conditions created by a trusting environment.”
Hallam’s advice to principals is to “not assume trust.” It’s not a given; it’s something that takes intentional effort, she says. “You’re the lead learner in the building. And if you’re not the one showing it, modeling it, and talking about it, then no one else is going to pay attention to it.”
Ultimately, Hallam says, “it goes back to the whole idea of trust in the Lord. You know, ‘Why did I come here? Why did I do this?’ Well, if I trust in the Lord that He’s got a plan for me and that He has a plan for my life, and if I put my trust in Him . . . and I live faithfully, I know that things are going to turn out okay.”