Why you should believe in yourself
The search for the “right” strategies
“[There is no magic bullet] in classrooms or at writing retreats, no matter how enticing the brochures may be.”
(Stephen King)
Imagine you are a teacher who strongly believes we should help students become self-directed and responsible learners. The issue with one of your badminton classes was that the students had very diverse learning needs. Hence, you asked colleagues for help using differentiated instruction (D.I.).
A colleague told you that he is not so sure about D.I. but has heard of people splitting the class into “High abilities” (HA), “Middle abilities” (MA) and “Low abilities” (LA). In your mind, you thought about the challenge of splitting the class into HA, MA and LA. So you went to ask another colleague about how to split the class. The colleague told you, “Maybe use one lesson to do an assessment of their badminton skills”.
Splitting the class was already daunting to you. Now, you have to use one lesson to do an assessment. You wanted a more efficient way of assessing the students, so you went to ask your batchmate in the WhatsApp group for help. “Hey, does anyone know how to do assessment most efficiently?” One friend said, “Maybe you can try using peer assessment”. But another friend said, “I don’t trust the students to assess. They would always do it wrongly!” Although you felt teachers should trust students, you thought listening to friends with experiences is better.
You were worried about taking too much time using assessments to split the class into three groups because you were left with only 10 lessons. You asked around again, and two colleagues suggested you use the affordances of EdTech. You thought it was a good idea. You could ask them to record themselves and upload them in Padlet. But because your friends told you not to trust the students, you decided to do the assessment yourself by spending the night watching every video.
Because the students did not know how to take the videos well, you could not see clearly which level they belonged to. You were frustrated because after spending 2 hours watching the videos, you still could not group them into HA, MA and LA. You texted your batchmates, “The students did not take the peer video recording seriously!” One of your friends replied, “Hey, I can understand how you feel. They are not serious about PE. You should let the form teacher know so they can help you talk to the students.”
Following your passion
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
(Carl Rogers)
Imagine you stepped into a time machine and returned to the start of the story. You still believe that we should help the students become self-directed and responsible learners, and you still have the same issue with the class. But this time, you decided to just believe in yourself. You said to yourself, “I WILL help them become self-directed and responsible learners!”
You thought splitting the groups into HA, MA, and LA might be a good idea. However, you thought it could be time-consuming to assess the abilities of each student. You also believe students learn at different speeds, so you must assess them regularly. You looked back at your belief and decided to empower the students to decide on one of the three learning tasks.
Your mind told you there could be problems, such as students cheating because they want to be with their own friends. But you told yourself you could convince them to practice using the appropriate challenge.
During the lessons, you split the hall into three zones of different tasks and told the students to choose the tasks that were suitable for them. To convince them, you explained the rationale for choosing the right task. Still, you noticed a handful of students did not want to choose the tasks that were achievable for them because they said, “Not fun”.
You told yourself that you would convince them to choose the tasks appropriate for them so that they would see more success. In the following lesson, you asked them to do nonstop rallies as a warm-up. You gave them a goal of 5 continuous hits rally. Everyone could achieve the target. Then, you asked them to set a higher target for themselves. You saw the whole class fully engaged because everyone felt they could achieve the target and were motivated.
You gathered them and asked them to tell their partner how they felt about the practice. Then you explained again that learning at the “Just-right” level makes them enjoy the practice and helps them improve much faster. You said, “If you think the task becomes too easy and you feel bored, modify it so that it stretches your abilities but does not give you anxiety.” The students were convinced.
It develops critical thinking and problem-solving skills
“It is courage which can find the solution to every problem.”
(Amit Kalantri)
Although it was just a fictitious story, many of us would have similar experiences as a teacher. We often have greater student outcomes when we believe we can (self-efficacy) (Barni et al., 2019).
According to Albert Bandura, self-efficacy is important because it is part of the self-system comprised of our attitudes, abilities, and cognitive skills. This system plays a major role in perceiving and responding to different situations (Cherry, 2023). When we believe we can do it, we look at the situation positively, thinking we can meet our goals. We will look for ways to achieve what we want to achieve.
Teachers make an estimated 1500 decisions a day (Klein, 2021). People who think positively have a greater capacity to embrace information, helping them to make the right decisions (Post, 2023). For example, if you think you will embarrass yourself when you go up the stage to ask for volunteers for an upcoming school event, you would quickly share and likely get a low sign-up. But if you believe you can get a lot of volunteers, you will start thinking of what students really want and give a good motivational speech to motivate them to participate.
Whenever we feel the anxiety of a challenge, our brain might produce an automatic fight-or-flight automatic physiological reaction (Psychology Tools, 2023). That is why you might do a short sharing and leave the stage quickly. However, if we believe in ourselves, we may not feel the threats in these situations (Tahmassian, 2011), and hence our performance would improve.
Imagine you just took over a secondary three class, which has given their secondary one and two Physical Education (PE) teachers a lot of headaches. The students were not motivated to learn anything in secondary one and two. They often quarrelled with the teachers, and many would find excuses to sit out of PE lessons.
When you took their lessons, many of them took a long time to enter the sports hall, and the rest of the students were mainly unmotivated. After the lesson, you said to yourself, “One day, I will change their mindset towards PE!”
You thought maybe the students had many years of poor PE experiences. Obliging to PE teachers’ instruction might mean doing a lot of running and push-ups, which would embarrass them. You thought you needed to help them see that learning a physical activity can be enjoyable. But they have to start learning something first.
Knowing the class mainly like badminton, volleyball and basketball, you told the class they would choose between the three sports from the next lesson. A few days before the lessons, you kept reminding them about the sports they will learn to excite them.
Exciting them was quite successful because they were on time for the PE lesson. Motivated by the success, you tell yourself, “Next step, I’m going to make them see learning as joyful!”
You wrote an achievable learning goal for each sport on each of three A1-size papers. For example, the learning goal for badminton is to hit the shuttlecock 10 consecutive times with each other. You told them to write their names on the paper once they reached the learning goal. You also walk around the hall praising them for their efforts because you know they hardly have positive affirmation from anyone. You also encourage them to set their own success criteria at the start of every lesson.
To cut a long story short, the students loved PE lessons after 3 months, and you were able to get them to learn the same sports together.
The story is about one of my successful experiences a few years ago. I was paired with a colleague who always believed we could change students’ attitudes toward learning. Through our conversation, I was influenced by his positive mindset toward challenges. Because we believed we could, we constantly thought of new ideas to influence them. Each time we succeeded, we became even more motivated to continue.
It develops resilience and a growth mindset
“Just believe in yourself. Even if you don’t, pretend that you do and at some point you will.”
(Venus William)
When we wholeheartedly believe in ourselves that we can, we may still not succeed in what we set out to do. But if you think about it, what makes us successful in any endeavour? Don’t we have to set a short-term goal, believe in ourselves, and try repeating it for 10,000 hours?
As Hargreaves and Fullan (2015) pointed out in the book Professional Capital, if we use the professional capital view, good teaching is technically sophisticated and difficult. Improving our craft requires lots of deliberate practice and resilience to persevere. It is not a collection of “magic bullets”, and miracles will happen.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can easily give us many strategies in seconds if good teaching is only about searching for good strategies. But we know that it will never happen. Hence, we need to understand that we still need to work hard on reading, reflecting, and practising. And to be motivated to do all this hard work, we need to believe in ourselves.
References
Barni, D., Danioni, F., & Benevene, P. (2019). Teachers’ Self-Efficacy: The role of personal values and motivations for teaching. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01645
Cherry, K. (2023, February 27). Self-efficacy and why believing in yourself matters. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-self-efficacy-2795954
Hargreaves, A., & Fullan, M. (2015). Professional capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School. Teachers College Press.
Klein, A. (2021, December 7). 1,500 decisions a day (At least!): How teachers cope with a dizzying array of questions. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/1-500-decisions-a-day-at-least-how-teachers-cope-with-a-dizzying-array-of-questions/2021/12
Post, J. (2023, February 21). To infinity and beyond: harnessing the power of positive thinking. business.com. https://www.business.com/articles/the-power-of-positive-thinking-in-business/
Psychology Tools. (2023, February 21). resource | Psychology Tools. https://www.psychologytools.com/resource/fight-or-flight-response/
Tahmassian, K. (2011, January 1). Relationship between Self-Efficacy and symptoms of anxiety, depression, worry and social avoidance in a normal sample of students. PubMed Central (PMC). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3939966/
