Nancy's Note (October 2026)

What leads students to trust their professors—and what do professors actually do that builds that trust?   

Last year, I joined The Trust Collaborative, an international collaborative research project exploring those questions.  Amanda Kerr (graduate assistant in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship in the Faculty Commons) is working with me on the TWU portion of the project. 

Colleagues at institutions in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand have already surveyed their students, and even more have joined us for the next phase of the research, and Amanda and I are hoping to bring the perspectives of TWU students this year. 

TWU students can add perspectives that aren’t well represented in the research so far. As a public university, a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and the nation’s largest university primarily for women, TWU serves a distinctive student population whose experiences can help us develop a richer understanding of what leads students to trust their professors across different students and institutional contexts.

Can We Visit Your Class?

To include TWU students in this IRB-approved research, we need survey responses from at least 100 undergraduates. We’re looking for faculty who’ll let us visit an undergraduate class for about 15 minutes.  We’ll briefly introduce the study and give students access to an anonymous online survey that takes about 10–15 minutes. We’ll handle everything: we just need some classes to visit. 

And importantly, the survey isn’t asking students about you or the course we’re visiting. Instead, we ask students to think about any TWU professors they trust and tell us what those professors did that led them to develop that trust.