Skills Guide
Teaching: Building Trust
Building Trust
WhyTry Units:
Why This Skill Matters
Trust is essential for healthy relationships and supportive learning environments. When students struggle with trust, they may resist help, disengage from adults, or escalate conflicts with peers. Trust supports emotional safety, openness, and collaboration—all of which are critical for resilience. Helping students understand how trust is built and repaired empowers them to form stronger, more supportive relationships over time.
Student Challenges This Skill Helps Address
- Resistance to adults
- Peer conflict
- Difficulty forming healthy relationships
How WhyTry Builds This Skill
WhyTry builds trust through relationship-focused learning. In Peer Influence & Positive Relationships, students examine how honesty, consistency, and choices impact trust with peers. This is reinforced in Support Systems & Relationship Building, where students reflect on reliable support and mutual respect. Responsibility & Self-Discipline further strengthens trust by emphasizing follow-through and meeting expectations, helping students see trust as something built through consistent action.
Peer Influence & Positive Relationships
(“Climbing Out”)
In Peer Influence & Positive Relationships, trust is taught as something built through consistent actions—respect, honesty, boundaries, and repair after conflict. Facilitators process with students how trust grows, how it gets damaged, and what it looks like to rebuild it. This strengthens resilience because students with healthier trust skills navigate peer dynamics more safely and experience stronger relational support.
Support Systems & Relationship Building
(“Plugging In”)
Support Systems & Relationship Building reinforces trust by helping students identify trustworthy people and understand what healthy support feels like. Processing focuses on how trust is earned over time and how students can both receive and contribute to safe relationships. This unit helps students strengthen resilience by learning to rely on appropriate supports and by building relational stability.
Responsibility & Self-Discipline
(“Lift the Weight”)
In Responsibility & Self-Discipline, trust is connected to reliability and follow-through. Facilitators guide students to reflect on how keeping commitments, meeting expectations, and practicing self-control affects the way others view and support them. Processing reinforces that trust often grows from small, repeated acts of responsibility—one of the most practical ways students build resilience in school and in life.