As educators during our teacher training days, we have been exposed to different schools of thoughts like cognitivism, neobehaviourism and behaviourism that came from famous people like Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, Pavloy, Skinner and Bandura.
Why are these theories of learning so important to educators?
There are very experienced teachers who felt that they really don’t need all these learning theories and they can cope with all the learning needs simply with their teaching experiences.
Theories can be treated as the basic baseline of learning habits in generalisation.
These theories can give us some ideas of how our pupils learn as well as possible difficulties that they face.
What is self-efficacy?
This sounded like self-esteem that most of us know.
There were a number of research done on self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is important to educators as it provides us with awareness of pupils’ beliefs about their abilities, capability to master as well as feelings of competency.
By knowing our pupils’ level of self-efficacy, an educator can make academic decision to help struggling learners with their beliefs of their ability to learn and increase their interest to engage in academic activities.
Many pupils with low self-efficacy have already concluded their own destiny for failure even before any assessment done.
How can we help pupils with self-efficacy?
I must admit that I am quite new to this theory of self-efficacy by Bandura and we can learn together in this. You can explore more by google.
I would just like to start of with some ideas and teachers with more ideas are welcome to give your comments to provide your interesting strategies that you used before in your classroom to level up self-efficacy.
Plan moderate level of task
Plan task that is too simple may be interpreted by pupils that their teacher doubts their abilities.
Plan task that is too difficult may cause reduce of confidence and fulfil their own predicted failure.
Plan a task that is a familiar context that provides some level of challenge to give meaningful success and achievement to struggling learners.
Student models
- Let them see how their classmate complete a certain task first before they attempt it.
Observing others enable pupils with low self-efficacy to gain coping models to overcome their learning difficulties and achieve the similar results as the better ones.
Allow student models to tell them their mistakes so that pupils with low self-efficacy can avoid them.
Master one specific task at a time
Identify the specific learning skill to achieve so that specific learning strategy can be implemented.
Provide lots of reinforcement for the same task under different context to ensure struggling learners acquired the skill.
Praise should be specific
- Teachers should not praise every single action to make praise reduce in value.
- Praise a specific action and make known to pupils what he/she did to deserve the praise for that specific task completed.
Eg. Don’t just keep saying ‘Good job!’
What is the good job?
Be specific about it.
Is it for writing a good content?
Is it for using the right vocabulary?
Be specific!
This is a short article to give some ideas about self-efficacy where further research and reading would be required to implement classroom intervention more effectively.
I hope this is a useful educational consideration to you as an educator as well as parent.
Disclaimer: This is my personal reflection and I am not in any position to instruct anyone what they should do. I am not responsible for any action taken as a result of this post. My post can only be a reference for your further research and growth. By reading this post, you acknowledge and accept that. All images and pictures were taken from google images that are free from copyright under labelled for reuse.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://fun2learn.vornix.blog/2018/06/29/what-is-self-efficacy/