Schools that build and support high levels of trust between stakeholder groups have been shown to support greater collaboration amongst those groups, including parents, teachers, administrators, and students (Tschannen-Moran, 2001). When stakeholders in schools feel the sense of psychological safety that accompanies trust, they are more willing or likely to engage in the behaviors that support continuous improvement, including speaking up about concerns or mistakes, seeking help or feedback from one another, innovating, and engaging in relational bridge-building across traditional institutional boundaries (Cosner, 2009). In addition to fostering collaborative behaviors, trust has been found to be related to a host of other positive organizational outcomes, such as the establishment of more just organizational structures in schools (Hoy and Tarter, 2004), greater organizational attachment by teachers (Bryk and Schneider, 2002), and healthier school climates (Tschannen-Moran and Gareis, 2015). Rarely, however, has trust between youth and adults been studied to understand how it might contribute to their successful collaboration and accomplishment of organizational goals or objectives (aside from student learning itself). This tendency is likely due to a strong institutional bias towards positioning students as the passive recipients of organizational reform efforts, rather than as active participants or collaborators in designing reforms to better serve their needs (Bragg, 2007; Cook-Sather, 2002; Fielding, 2001). This study seeks to identify the factors that led to trust formation between youth and adult teams engaged in one such initiative: a collaborative peer review project which engaged administrators, teachers and students in a quality review process developed as an alternative to the typical pathway to accreditation. Three schools participated in this alternative program in which joint teams of administrators, teachers, and high-school aged youth from each school used a variation on the practice of instructional rounds to gather information for continuous improvement efforts. The central research questions were: How was trust established between youth and adults working within collaborative peer review teams? What practices, beliefs and processes did participants perceive supported or undermined the formation of trust within these teams?