“We Are The Heartbeat of The School”: A Framework for Educator-to-Educator Relationships

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.