I am so excited that book on Self-Efficacy comes out on 31^st January. In this blog post, I wanted to share some of my personal motivations behind the book and what I hope it will achieve.

Self-efficacy, born from the ideas of Albert Bandura, is defined as the extent to which we believe our actions in a specific field or domain is likely to yield a positive outcome. Albert Bandura also argued that our feeling of self-efficacy is central to whether or not we feel we can influence what we do and what is happening around us. In other words, the extent to which we have agency.

My obsession with self-efficacy has come from a desire to find ways of thinking that help people influence and shape the journey of their lives. Whether this was with parents as a parent and family support worker, young children as a teacher or adults as an academic or a researcher, I believe that our end goal in working with people is so that they have the tools, knowledge and capacities that they can go out into the world and do something. To feel they have agency, and to use that agency for themselves, for the people they love and for their communities. Therefore, for me, a central question of our efforts as educators should be how we develop the self efficacy, the belief their actions can yield a positive result, of the individuals in our care.

Here are of the key ideas within self-efficacy which underpins why I think it is such a useful construct for educators to know about and to reflect upon within their practice.

The first is that self-efficacy forces us to explore the interplay between the individual and their environment. Core to self-efficacy is the idea that our performance is mediated by the interaction between the individual and their conditions. Rather then placing all the responsibility on an individuals motivations or on the richness of their environment, raising self-efficacy recognises the need to explore both in tandem. If an individual student is not able to perform, we need to explore whether the individual has the requisite knowledge, or if the individuals they are working with are not supporting them adequately.

Second is how self-efficacy brings together the high quality mechanisms of instruction associated with the ‘cog sci’ movement with the emotive components of learning. Developing self-efficacy is in part developing ones technical capacities and knowledge. As educators, this means pulling on what we know from sound instruction – modelling, breaking goals down into smaller components components and beyond. However, this alone is insufficient. Banduras world recognise that your actions don’t just depend on knowing. They also depend on feeling that you can use that knowledge and doing so will have a positive effect. Seeing the person engage in the perfect model is not sufficient if you cannot identify that the person and the model is similar enough for you to be convinced that you could emulate it. Working with how we feel about our knowledge and developing this tool set explicitly is therefore critical if students are to act and influence their outcomes. If our goal is to raise self-efficacy, then we need to work on both the student/pupils technical capacities and how they feel about a specific task or behaviour – and doing so means developing our own professional self-efficacy in each these domains.

Finally, developing self-efficacy is not rocket science. You don’t need huge, massive programmes of change to develop self-efficacy. You don’t need 2 year long programmes which develop good practitioners in to self-efficacy warriors. Often, it is about making tweaks to our current practice and being intentional about the goal of raising self-efficacy. In my book, I talk about the many tweaks which, when based on a sound understanding of the ideas underpinning self-efficacy, can elevate a typical task or approach into something quite transformative.

What I hope this book will achieve is to bring some attention back to Bandura’s core ideas, and how I believe they are useful bridges across some of the polarised debates which exist in education. Furthermore, through detailed examples and (what I hope is) a clear broken down and practically orientated introduction to the theory of self-efficacy, that it will raise the self-efficacy of practitioners. Finally, I hope that the book help educators to think about their role – what are we here to do and how we can leverage our position to change how learners feel about themselves and their capacity to influence their lives.

Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to share more about my motivations and thoughts behind the book. But I hope this blog will give you a taster as to what’s to come!

For now, you can pre-order my book here: https://amzn.eu/d/6mtIlBS