Self-Efficacy

Self-Efficacy

I see this term everywhere lately. It makes a lot of sense to me. The administration at my school often makes announcements to tell the students how proud they are of them, how they always do the right thing. They have backgrounds in elementary schools where this might be helpful, but for adolescents it becomes a joke. We have positive drug tests every single day at our school, so they know they don't always do the right thing. I always thought they should say something like, "You must be really proud of yourself for XYZ." Teenagers don't do things to make teachers, administrators and parents proud; they do things because they want to achieve things.

Even more so with adults. Teachers need to feel confident in our own abilities. There is very little external reward for our efforts. Depending on the class, I might work incredibly hard to prepare and deliver an amazing lesson, but students are zoned out for whatever reason. I need to feel ok about what I've done and keep working even if it looks like I'm not getting anywhere. Some days (weeks, months, years) can be like that, but other times we see the results of our efforts -- my students will go up 100 points on the SAT and I know it's because I kept drilling sentence structure and subject-verb agreement. (I teach SAT prep, and this is a very visual way to show that I have been effective in my teaching.)

In The Well-Balanced Teacher, one bullet point that stood out to me was to "Eliminate negative self-talk." Somedays I have a non-stop monologue going on in my head about why I'm not good at what I do or that other people have it all together and I am the only one who is struggling. I am really going to work hard at stopping that voice. It is not helping me, that is for sure.