Chapter 4: Creating a Culture Of Pedagogical Innovation Through Cultivating Trust and Safety in Faculty Peer Coaching

This chapter offers a theoretical and practical approach to the importance of cultivating trust and security in a faculty peer coaching model. We explore the research on psychological safety and its connection to human development, how the International Coaching Federation’s core competency on trust and safety aligns with a faculty peer coaching model, and how practitioners can encourage trust and safety in formative faculty development and assessment through co-created values, validation, and simple techniques. Emphasizing the conditions which enable relationships of trust can contribute to a robust faculty-peer coaching model that bolsters an institutional commitment to faculty and student success. This transformational, rather than transactional, approach has the potential to shift the narrative around teaching as something that people either “are or are not” good at, to an institutional investment in ongoing pedagogical development and improvement, leading to a transformation of the institution itself.