Research has established positive relationships and trust as cornerstones for successful youth-adult partnerships (YAPs), yet limited work addresses how to sustain struggling partnerships, particularly in low-trust environments. Using an explanatory, sequential mixed-methods design, this study first quantitatively affirmed the importance of strong teacher-student relationships as precursors for the formation of classroom YAPs (known here as Student Voice Partnerships or SVPs). Subsequent qualitative data explains that youth define these relationships through the lens of trust, actively assessing adults to determine their trustworthiness—a process aligning with concepts of discernment and calculation. Drawing on organizational trust and relational resilience frameworks, this study offers an interdisciplinary model for closing the trust gap between teachers and youth in neighborhoods with high levels of racial bias. We demonstrate that adults must proactively signal trustworthiness by demonstrating two core themes: care (expressed through one-on-one connections and seeing the youth’s “whole self”) and respect (demonstrated via transparency, adaptability, and reliability).
Educator-to-educator relationships are critical for a range of educator, student, and school-wide outcomes. To foster and sustain healthy educator-to-educator relationships, a comprehensive framework is needed to understand what informs those relationships and how they function. Through thematic analysis of focus group and interview data from 72 educators in the United States, this qualitative study generated a multi-layered framework that highlights the key actions (communicate, collaborate, support), beliefs (values, respect, trust), and connections (connect professionally, connect personally, inclusion and bias) that constitute educator-to-educator relationships. Additionally, guided by the process-person-context-time (PPCT) model, the framework points out the important influences that school culture and climate, structural supports, and system-wide issues have on educator-to-educator relationships. Implications for research are discussed in terms of conceptualizing educator-to-educator relationships from behavioral, social-cultural, relational, and ecological perspectives. This more holistic approach to understanding relationships between educators can help bring discrete bodies of literature (e.g., on trust, collaboration, school culture and climate) into dialogue with one another. Implications for practice included a list of actionable strategies, grouped by themes from this study, that educators and school leaders can take to strengthen educator-to-educator relationships.
This study examines how critical participatory action research (cPAR) can advance education measurement development by positioning Black and Latino students and their teachers as co-researchers. As part of the Adapted Measure of Math Engagement (AM-ME) Project, a three-year partnership with a school district in the Midwestern region of the U.S., students, teachers, and academic researchers collaboratively defined math engagement, co-created survey items, analyzed qualitative evidence, and developed practice recommendations. Drawing on reflections, artifacts, and action-planning products from the AM-ME Research Group, findings show that participation fostered new researcher identities for students and teachers, strengthened cultural responsiveness and methodological rigor, and generated actionable classroom and district strategies. The project highlights how embedding cPAR into measurement development may produce more credible and culturally grounded instruments and cultivate youth and teacher agency while directly informing educational practice. These results highlight the potential of participatory methodologies to bridge research and practice and to expand how developmental and educational sciences conceptualize student engagement.
