BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
Imagine you’re a first-year teacher at a new school. You don’t know everyone yet, you’re still learning the rhythms of the building, and you’re trying to find your footing.
You have an idea you want to try in your classroom, but you don’t know if it’s appropriate for the age group or the unit. What would you do next? I suspect many of you would seek feedback from a colleague — perhaps someone you admire, or someone you trust.

What if your idea is something bigger, for the entire school — a new program, an initiative, a solution to a problem? Would you set up a meeting with the principal, bring it up at a faculty meeting, or talk it through with a colleague first?

What if you’ve already tried a new idea out with your students, and you’re unsure how it landed? Do you base your judgment on your own observations, or do you go looking for feedback — from your students, maybe even their parents?

I suspect your answer to any of these questions depends on your relationships with your supervisors, your colleagues, and your students.
Good relationships are productive relationships. People feel safe, motivated, and more willing to share ideas. Weaker relationships can have the opposite effect. In those situations, people might feel demotivated, less likely to take risks, and be more judgemental on new ideas.

This is why relationships matter so much in education: a good relationship supports creativity, whereas a bad one can hinder it. But good relationships often take time to develop, and often there needs to be an intentional effort to build them.

Welcome to episode four of this Listen and Learn series, which brings us to the fourth of the ten actions for fueling creativity in education: Build Relationships.

WHAT “BUILD RELATIONSHIPS” ACTUALLY MEANS

When we first identified this action, we originally called it “Establish Relationships.” But relationships that involve trust and safety don’t happen by accident. They’re built through small, repeated moments that connect one person to another, time and time again.
While many factors contribute to the formation of relationships, there are strategies educators can use to build stronger connections with their students and establish a sense of trust in the classroom.

Simple things, like knowing each of your students’ birthdays, acknowledging important events they experience during the year — like participating in a soccer tournament — or sharing a personal struggle of your own, are some of the suggestions our guests proposed during our interviews on the podcast.
Like our opening story suggested, the action Build Relationships is also applicable to a teacher’s work with their colleagues, and to how an administrator engages with their faculty. Like students, teachers must feel safe and secure when proposing and experimenting with new ideas. They must feel supported when things go wrong, so they don’t choose to avoid the necessary risks they might need to take in the future.

And through these relationships, a creative culture can emerge, one that trickles down, allowing ideas to flourish across student projects, school productions, extracurricular activities, and so much more.

That’s the real promise of building relationships deliberately: a culture where creativity isn’t confined to one classroom or one project, but moves freely throughout an entire school.

But not every relationship will support creativity in this way, and recognizing the difference between the relationships that lift us and the ones that quietly hold us back is just as much a part of this work as building the good ones.

So here’s something to sit with this week — not an assignment, just a couple of questions.
First: think about who you’d go to if you had a new idea and wanted honest feedback. What is it about that relationship that makes them the person you’d trust with something unfinished, or unfamiliar?

Now think about the opposite. Who are the people you’re less likely to bring an idea to, the ones who make you hold back, or even shut the idea down before you’ve said it out loud? What is it about that relationship that does that?

The first answer is a small picture of the kind of relationship worth building, with your supervisors, your colleagues, and your students. The second is a picture of what to watch for, and maybe work to change.

Identifying the difference between these relationships is the first step. What comes next are the strategies you use to build more of the first kind, while doing less of whatever contributes to the second.

In the book, we go deeper into the research behind psychological safety and trust, and share more stories — including how one school built an entire culture of creative risk-taking, starting with a single relationship between a principal and her teachers.

And at the heart of all these examples, are stories of trust. When we build it deliberately, with our colleagues and our students, we make room for the kind of risk taking essential to creativity – the kind that can change how students approach projects, and the choices they make along the way.

Matthew: We hope you enjoyed this episode of our Summer 2026 Listen and Learn series. And don’t forget your letter for this week, it’s E.

Cyndi: Write it down, hold onto it, and keep collecting because you’ll need all ten to unscramble the secret phrase and enter to win a signed copy of The Future Creative. You can submit your entry at FuelingCreativityPodcast.com/summerreading2026, and that’s also where you’ll find more information about the book, including where to pre-order it.

Matthew: We are still booking guests for Season 13 of the podcast, so if you have ideas for researchers or practitioners you’d love to hear from, or topics you want us to dig into, please reach out at ideas@fuelingcreativitypodcast.com.
Cyndi: Stay curious, keep that door open, and I will see you right back here next week. Matthew: Thanks for listening to Fueling Creativity in Education.