September 24, 2026. No. 201 (Read online)
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Trust as Infrastructure for School Change​
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In my years of working with schools I can’t remember a time where there has been more consensus around a sense of urgency: a general feeling of gravity and that structural transformations are coming at schools and their systems, whether or not we are ready for them.

Over the past month I’ve visited schools in six countries and three continents to find powerful, shared, underlying themes across seemingly disparate contexts - from China to Scandinavia. Of course, the universal sense of anxiety is largely powered by AI and an existential foreboding about the future of the human race, no less, but it’s also coming from a fierce determination to protect children and take back hope for the future - linked to questions around “What is Sacred?”

It’s clear that standing still is not an option, even if you love everything your school is doing (but who does?). So I keep coming back to a simple question: what is standing between schools and the change everyone seems to want? It’s pretty clear we’ve all had enough of thinking it’s a missing strategy or framework. The zeitgeist (and the data) right now seems to be zooming in on a missing feeling of trust in institutions, in AI, in politics, and in one another.
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Reading Pasi Sahlberg's new piece, Trust: the missing link in educational change put structure around this idea. Sahlberg looks back at twenty-five years of education reform — standards, data systems, accountability regimes, all built with real intelligence and real intention — and asks why so much of it has failed to stick. His answer isn't that we picked the wrong interventions. It's that we treated change as a technical problem when all along it was a relational one.

When the force behind the successful Finnish educational shifts argues that trust isn't simply a nice byproduct of good reform, but the precondition for change, I hope that gets leaders and policy makers to pay attention. How many strategic plans and detailed initiative roll outs were technically sound but relationally hollow and thus doomed to fail?

Sahlberg is careful not to romanticize trust. He's clear-eyed about the risk of using it as a rhetorical flourish. Folks know when it’s just a word leaders reach for, as performance or even weapon, while still running schools using old systems of surveillance, measurement, comparison, and compliance, and modeling power relations that go against all aspirations of agency, shared decision-making, and community-building.

Real trust, he argues, has to be built through coherence between what a system says about its educators and how it actually treats them. Building trust takes commitment and integrity, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. You might commit to two simple steps: 1. Listen (more fully, actively, generously), and 2. Stop the practices that have been quietly eroding trust.
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Before we start asking how to foster trust, we need to ask what we need to stop doing.

What would you stop doing, if you let yourself ask that question honestly?

This is where two other widely-cited pieces complement Sahlberg's. The MIT AI Task Force report makes the case that AI policy is really a proxy for something bigger — a culture oriented toward human flourishing rather than mere efficiency. I think this stands as a brilliant signal toward wholeness in schools, not only higher education. There’s much more to unpack about this initiative from MIT, but the take-aways that we are in a “watershed moment” (i.e., a critical turning point that changes the course of history, an organization, or a person's life) for the academy and that “far and away the most important work will be cultural” underscore the priority of people over policy (and AI), and connection before correction, even at a place as technically-centered as MIT. Meanwhile, Stanford Social Innovation Review's piece on relational intelligence argues that as AI reshapes work and learning, the capacities that matter most are the deeply human, relational ones — the very muscles that get atrophied under high-control, low-trust systems.

These make me think of Margaret Wheatley’s maxim: Whatever the problem, community is the solution.​
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Put the three articles together and some breadcrumbs begin to emerge: the future isn't demanding all schools becoming more technically sophisticated. We need them to become more trustworthy. Trust is a condition needed to be responsible to each other, to families, to the students, and staff who can tell, instantly, when they're being managed rather than understood.

In my work with school heads and boards, we explore paths toward making trust visible. This can start with deconstructing common "enemies of trust;" developing robust organizational trust models across various perceptions, cultures, and life experiences has been a really worthwhile investment of time for teams and Boards – often to surprising effect. Clarifying personal, strategic, and organizational trust (unbundling it from the personal) allows us to be more open to truths that are hard to see or admit, and to relinquish some control to distribute power.

Finally, a question I’ve been thinking a lot about: If we strive to move beyond roles as reform-designers or policy-implementers, toward being keepers and stewards of trust as the infrastructure everything else depends on, how do we move toward an authentic culture of trust, and not trust as performance?

What's one thing, this week, that you could stop doing so the people you lead have a little more room to trust you, and each other, again?

With hope,

Homa

Reminder: Two Offerings From the Big Questions Institute

We are continuously striving to update offerings to meet the challenges of the moment and we believe these two provide precisely that.

1. Leading Community-Based Change - Where School Teams Join a Global Cohort

Transcend and Big Questions Institute (BQI), in collaboration with AAIE and AISH, are excited to invite international school teams to join a new global cohort focused on leading change with their communities, not just for them.
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This six-month experience will bring together a small group of international school teams to advance a real priority already in motion at their school. Teams will have the opportunity to work together on questions like:
• What do our students actually experience day to day, and what needs to shift in how we design learning?
• What does our community most need from school in a world shaped by AI and rapid change?
• How do we move from a compelling vision to designing real changes in learners' daily experiences?
• How do we build the conditions and coalitions needed to make meaningful change stick?
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Along the way, teams will engage with tools and methods such as:
• Validated student voice surveys to understand the current state of learner experience
• Community listening and engagement processes to build shared understanding and coalition
• Sample Models from schools that have redesigned learning environments in powerful ways
• Conditions assessments to identify what is ready and what needs strengthening
• Collaborative supports to design and test improvements to learner experience
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The cohort will include virtual monthly sessions, guided team work between sessions, and coaching.
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In the spirit of our community-based approach to design, we are shaping the final cohort experience in partnership with the schools who join. We are hosting interest calls to share more and hear from prospective participants. Reach out to Holly at holly@transcendeducation.org to learn more, share about your context and goals, or hold a spot in the cohort for your school.

2. Robust and Relevant Goal-Setting, Evaluation, and Collaboration for Heads of School and Boards (esp Board Chairs) - VISTA

Registration is open now, and we are limiting it to the first TEN independent or international schools that sign up.

We have seasoned coaches (former Heads of School) ready to work with VISTA partner schools, a brand-new guide, and even a proprietary collaboration app. All of this is designed to equip leadership teams with structured tools and reflective practices to:
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🌱 Align around shared values and language
🌱 Amplify the strengths already present in their communities
🌱 Build the systemic agility to co-create meaningful goals for Heads and Boards

This isn't another compliance checklist. It's a framework for transformational leadership rooted in dignity, purpose, and collective flourishing.
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Find out more about the VISTA program and how it can support your school, here👇
​https://bigquestions.institute/vista-partnership-commitment/​
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Questions? Reach out to kyra@bigquestions.institute for support on this, or any other question you have for BQI.
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