Doorstops: Potential for more trusting schools

I am traveling across the country researching how trust is built, working to empower student voices.

Open air school in the Netherlands, 1957.

In high school, I was more focused on how teachers taught than what they taught. On why students listened, or didn’t. On what made them feel happy, engaged, or safe. Now, as a junior at Princeton on a year off, I’m continuing that research at scale, with planned and completed visits to low income, high income, urban, rural, public, and private schools in 16 states. There’s a handful of doorstops in my backpack—I’m asking students, teachers, and administrators what to prop open.^[1]

Across classrooms, school districts, and state lines, schools are missing the same opportunities to improve student self-esteem and success. These opportunities center around trust and respect, and the goal of my research is to understand how trust is built in and around classrooms.

Trust is psychological safety, vulnerability, and hope: “I trust that you’ll listen intently if I share something personal.” It’s intuitive to most adults: a combination of behavior (e.g. eye contact, firm handshakes, keeping a promise) and intention (mutual respect, shared values).

In school, trust is impeded by a complex student-teacher power dynamic, a lack of space to address student anxieties, and a pervasive feeling of lost agency. Intention is chronically absent and behavior suffers as a result.

Students and teachers don’t always apologize to each other, and teachers can’t always intuit a student’s frustration.^[2] Perceived slights can go unaddressed, but students have to show up like yesterday didn't happen. If a student then loses trust with a teacher, they’ll stop paying attention, staring at the teacher like a bug on the wall or, maybe worse, staring out the window.^[3] 

Students don’t realize a teacher is tired because of yesterday’s hours-long, mandatory professional development, or stressed because they’re struggling with burnout. Students definitely don’t know their principal’s a jerk, or that the principal is great but district curricular requirements are the reason class is boring.^[4] 

They’re teenagers. They feel like they don’t belong, and at high schools where they walk through a metal detector every morning, they see evidence the district doesn’t, either.^[5] Students are afraid to ask for help if they’ve never seen a peer do it.^[6] They’ve probably never seen a peer be emotionally expressive in a classroom, either.^[7] One student might be stressed about college admissions, another about struggles at home, but under-resourced teachers are stuck treating them all like they have the same needs.

This environment is not conducive to trust.^[8] 

When students understand the power dynamic in classrooms, they are empowered to engage in spite of it. When students hear they aren’t alone in their anxieties, those anxieties fade. When students have opportunities to develop soft skills, they become better learners.

Students can fight for themselves and their peers, fight to build a better classroom community. I am working to provide the first push. Some of us lucky students got help from our parents, who fought to exempt us from dress codes, argued with a teacher who was treating us badly, or called us in sick for a vacation day.^[9] 

Without these experiences, students don’t know school isn’t absolute—its power is limited, and its winding, fluorescent-lit hallways can be navigated like any power structure: if you’re kind to a teacher, you can ask to leave class and walk around for 20 minutes when you’re stressed; if a teacher is unkind to you, you don’t have to sit there and take it.^[10] Articulate your frustration, identify key decision makers at your school, share your anxiety with trusted peers, or, if necessary, learn to be a little subversive.

Yes, SEL is great.^[11] Yes, restorative justice is great. Yes, education reform has struggled for the past 30 years, and the repercussions of online school have been severe.^[12] 

What about student voice? Student input is largely ignored in research, policy, and practice, but earning a student’s trust underlies all three.^[13] 

This is where my research comes into focus. I want to understand the student-teacher relationship, sharing my understanding with students while advocating for school-level changes that empower trust. Students will engage in school if they see they can make change, and I firmly believe they can.

Below is a more detailed overview of American high school education, how trust forms in and around classrooms, and the (feasible) changes I’m fighting for so far.

Education Reform and Research Takes On the Wrong Challenges

What makes a good school? There are universal, scalable opportunities for school improvement, but identifying them is difficult.^[14] I started my thought process on what kind of change I want to see by breaking down current approaches to reform: are they small or large, and are they applied on a one-size-fits-all (OSFA) or a school-by-school basis?

My matrix for types of education reform

Large OSFA reforms tend to struggle. There are large differences within academic environments even among seemingly similar schools.^[15] Within schools, there are often large variations in teaching styles.^[16] It is nearly impossible to identify large, one-size-fits-all (OSFA) changes that will benefit every student, classroom, and school.^[17] As a result, education policy often succeeds in small experiments, but falls flat at scale.^[18] 

Large School-by-School reforms have mixed results—like a billionaire launching a chain of charter schools—and are extremely expensive. I am not a billionaire or a lobbyist, and can’t shift the national policy conversation.^[19] Even if I fully believed in it, I don’t have the resources to enact this change.

Small School-by-School reforms are wonderful but very individualized. In one school, giving teachers the flexibility to design their own curricula might lead to more creative and engaging lessons. In another, the lack of accountability might lower performance. Education research is very focused on these types of reforms without an emphasis on their scalability.^[20]

Small OSFA reforms are much more successful. They often start with clear, noncontroversial research: waking up early has negative effects on teen health and academic performance, so schools should start later;^[21] recess has concrete social and emotional benefits for K-5 students, so it should be mandated.^[22] They don’t have large amounts of money or political capital behind them, so they aren’t always implemented at scale: select schools have pushed back start times and only 9 states have mandated recess.^[23] Where they are implemented, they always bring concrete improvements across all kinds of schools.

My project will start by searching for Small OSFA reforms,^[24] opportunities that are both low friction to capitalize on and effective independent of school or class type. Based on my experiences, research, and long conversations with students, I think many of these opportunities exist. Reforms should build trust and respect by encouraging students to ask for help, not by rethinking the shape of classrooms or rearranging desks.

There is an unmet demand for conclusive, comparative studies with a Small OSFA focus.^[25] Studies like this have taken place, but they do not always lead to nationwide policy change or mass shifts in best practices, even when the changes have proven to be scalable.^[26] In addition, while there is plenty of research on what makes a great school environment, there is little research on what students should do without one. I plan to remedy that with a focus on creating an emotionally compelling as well as intellectually rigorous final product.

I Will Focus On Trust

Student-centered learning approaches (SEL, restorative justice, culturally relevant pedagogy, trauma informed teaching, etc.) do not address what I believe is the fundamental reason students stare out the window instead of engaging in class: lost agency.^[27] Even in the most student-centered classrooms, school is something that is done to students, not something they do.^[28] 

The shortest path to agency is for students to actively build genuine connections with those around them: supportive peers, educators, and support staff make school a place worth going, a place with choice.^[29]

Relationships built on trust and respect are essential for a student’s esteem—and success.^[30] 

The student-teacher relationship is an anachronism. It's not a friendship, it's not an employment contract, and after you graduate, you won't experience anything like it again. While teachers are trained in how to handle it, students are not. Confusion about this power dynamic causes student anxiety.

For example, a student going through a mental health crisis might be afraid to ask for an extension, scared to open up about specific health issues, which they feel is necessary. Students do not realize the teacher can address their need (an extension) without crossing the unspoken boundary into want (giving them emotional support).^[31] In this case, the student-teacher relationship must meet a few preconditions for a student to comfortably ask for an extension.  

• A mutual understanding that a simple explanation is enough, e.g. “I need an extension for my assignment next week because I’ve been struggling with my mental health, and am too burnt out to work.”A teacher asking the student to elaborate would signal lack of trust.
• Trust that the teacher will respond with a version of, “That’s really hard, take as much time as you need.”
• Trust that a teacher won’t question the student’s honesty (an intention a student might perceive in the teacher's word choice or body language)
• Trust that the student isn’t lying, and a history evidencing this (e.g. the student doesn’t ask for an extension every week, or the student is committed to their work and values it)
• In competitive environments where giving extensions is not normal, students might benefit from a verbal explanation of a teacher’s boundaries: “I am here for your learning needs: they are my first priority. I don’t care what you want. I will give you an extension (needs) but I won’t ever give extra credit (want).” This boundary is contextual, varying classroom to classroom.^[32]

Students have little experience navigating boundaries like this one, and don’t often have the necessary scaffolding to develop that skill. Trust is built on shared values and psychological safety, both of which tend to be missing when there are vague boundaries at play. Students don’t always see opportunities to build trust with their teachers, or always know it’s an option.

The student-teacher relationship is implicit territory. Students are never asked, for example, “What does your ideal classroom look like? If your teacher was tired/frustrated in a one on one, do you think they’d show it? If you were angry at your teacher, could you start a conversation about your feelings?”

Low trust also leads to low engagement. Students don’t expect a genuine answer to, “Why are we learning this subject?” because they don’t think there is one. They don’t trust their teacher to make class fun, and don’t take it upon themselves to make it fun, either.

Everything from student personal traumas to unclear grading histories can complicate the student-teacher relationship, but anxieties around trust span far beyond the classroom. Students might get nervous in hallways deciding if they should say “Hi!” to a teacher, at home when they see a low participation grade, or in class when they’re confused — afraid to raise their hand. They might worry about college admissions if their school is competitive; bullying if trusted adults don’t acknowledge it; or personal issues if they don’t have a trusted adult to talk to.

All of these anxieties are underdiscussed. My research is focused on identifying, understanding, and demystifying them for students.

The final product of my research will be a set of resources for students paired with curricular suggestions for teachers.^[33] Both will articulate the student-teacher relationship in a simple way that empowers students to build more trusting relationships. In addition to creating these resources, this project will test their outcomes.

• This project doesn’t seek to turn classrooms upside down or propose one-size-fits-all solutions to teaching, which is highly contextual work that can’t be boiled down to “Ten Best Practices.”
• It focuses on small, universal, and solvable issues. Namely, how can we improve teacher-student and peer-to-peer interaction?

I will address student belonging and fulfillment by building trust in and around classrooms.

Through curriculum: In many classes, students don’t understand why they’re learning a subject, why they have to be nice to a “bad” teacher, why they should participate, proactively communicate, ask for help when they need it… the list goes on. When you don’t feel you have a reason to be in a class, you feel powerless. Here’s part of my solution:^[34] blog.benguzovsky.com/why

Through the school community: Teacher professional development sucks, a consensus shared by academics, educators, and administrators. It takes about 10% of a teacher’s time and 5-11% of school district budgets while having negligible impacts.^[35] This problem is intractable, but there is no existing bureaucratic jungle preventing high quality professional development for support staff: regular, brief, but genuine interactions with front office workers, custodians, and technology managers can help meet kids’ belonging needs.^[36] I want to bring teacher, student, and staff inputs together to design and promote that.

By aligning incentives: I also have an idea in the works for providing an alternative, healthier way to measure student success than test scores. This is *top secret* until developed further. It will pair nicely with *also secret* research I’m conducting on the efficacy of discussing power dynamics in classrooms, and of encouraging students to share emotions.

By empowering students: Nobody talks about school online. Students exist in bubbles: they believe nobody is going through the same struggles, or they’re convinced everyone is exactly like them. They don’t understand if their teacher is a friend or just friendly. They are bored. School feels like it’s happening to them. They don’t know that if they’re nice to a teacher, they can ask to walk out of class for 20 minutes to take a break and most teachers will say yes. I am working to create an online platform that paints a fair, lucid picture of the high school experience: How old were you when your teacher stopped being your 8am-2pm mom? What does your ideal teacher look like? If your math teacher was working the counter at a burger joint, would you be comfortable asking for free extra fries?

 I'm conducting formal research to see if students will emotionally benefit from thinking about questions like these.

Where I’ve been, and where I’m (tentatively) going.

I started this project in September 2022 and will continue until I return to Princeton in February 2023. This is a lifelong passion of mine, and I hope the outputs I create and test will serve as only my first wave of research into high school education.

I will be quiet. I will dress in neutral colors. I will make a minimal impact on classes I visit. I will talk to teachers, students, administrators, and everyone else with an interest or involvement in education. I do not only want to understand the education system: I want to identify concrete possibilities for change. As long as there are students who don’t have their emotional, social, and educational needs met in American classrooms, projects like this one are essential.