Tag: education

What I’m Learning about Self Efficacy – Agency, Adults and Inclusion

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In the last few months, it’s been a real privilege to see so many people engaging with my book Self-Efficacy in Action.

I first want to shout out Teacher Talk Radio, Jon Hutchinson, Sapphira Talbot-Strettlea and Ernest Jenvas at Edurio for inviting me onto their podcasts and giving me the chance to talk about it. You can find links to these talks here and here: https://youtu.be/YFWrMF6BR1A?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/mnND6q0R7Io?feature=shared

P.S. You can also buy the book here! https://amzn.eu/d/i7DjHdb

Throughout this time, I’ve spoken on these podcasts and to practitioners about the book and it’s meaning for them. Inevitably, with the talent that we have in our teaching profession, each conversation has made me wonder and think. What is it about self-efficacy that I’m learning? What are the part of the books that I now wish I’d written or wish I’d emphasised in greater detail? What are the parts that I feel are landing the most?

So, in this blog, I want to spend some time talking about three key ideas that I have learnt about self-efficacy in my interactions with people in the last few months.

Agency as a North Star

Something that has grabbed the attention of others (and of myself for that matter) is how inspired people have been by the notion of agency. The idea that we are preparing young people and adults to feel and know that they can make decisions for themselves and their communities. And that this should be our North Star. I found myself continually saying that I’m not quite sure what the education system should be working toward if it is not agency.

Agency means that we can influence and shape the directions of our lives. It means we can take the perspective on others on board, without being passively driven by them. It means that we can take the relatives risks we need to take – whether that’s applying for the University, we don’t feel we’re good enough for, the job that we feel that’s out of our reach or to throw ourselves into personal and social situations, which otherwise might seem daunting.

I’ve become quite obsessed about the idea that our professional development and school structures could be centrally organised around this goal. What if one of our core questions when designing learning experiences or curriculum, regardless of whether they are children or adults, is how are they will proactively develop a person’s sense of agency?

What About the Adults?

A few people have reflected that they found the book useful for the adults that they lead. Although the case studies are aimed at working with children, some leaders have been led to question whether or not their staff feel efficacious in their roles.

I would say the principles of self-efficacy are universally applicable. At its heart, we’re asking what we need in order for us to feel and know that our decisions can lead to a positive outcome. Do we have goals and clear manageable steps to work toward them? Are we receiving feedback that validates our performance and gives us the next step? Are we able to access credible and relatable models that are both instructionally sound and based on secure, trusting and open relationships?

Critically, do we recognise that our capacity to make decisions in our classrooms and in our teams is predicated on the environment and the individual’s interaction with it? This leads me to my next reflection.

Inclusion Requires Agency.

This final reflection is a bit of a” hotter” take. This is in part inspired by the work I do at ambition exploring how we can support teachers to work with a more diverse range of pupils in our mainstream classrooms.

I’m increasingly convinced that developing practitioners ability to work with a diverse range of need requires us to develop and enhance practitioner decision making. This includes decision-making in advance of lessons. However, this also requires us to work on how practitioners make adaptive decisions “in the moment” for when issues or challenges emerges through the learning process.

There are a whole host of factors that are interwoven which effect our capacity to make decisions. The knowledge that we hold – do we understand how different needs (Physical, sensory, executive functioning etc ) can emerge and present themselves as well as what we can do to incorporate this need into our teaching. How much we have practised decision making in a safe environment. Watching and listening to how others make decisions and reflecting upon that for our own process. Brought together, all these activities can support efficacy, and eventually agency. Ultimately, we need to feel that we can take those decisions and that they will have and a positive influential effect on our students.

Often, protocols of teaching and learning can be incredibly helpful devices. However, we should be prepared to ask how they support decision making and not replace it. Make these protocols too prescriptive we might not be able to build our efficacy, and therefore the extent to which we are willing to take decision when the protocol doesn’t apply or reaches it limits. Prescriptions, protocols and frameworks on ‘what’ to do can only go so far. This is especially the case when working with a more diverse range of needs, when the opportunity for the unexpected is higher and documenting every possible decision would just be impossible. The self fulfilling prophecy, where a protocol that is too tightly held limits decision making, restricting teachers further and unwillingness to act outside of pre-determined parameters.

Equally, we can’t just say ‘here’s agency, do what you like’. That would be irresponsible. It would set many to fail. It might be that, as situations becomes more complex the capacity to prescribe the ‘what’ diminishes. Instead we need to focus on approaches which develop ‘how’ decisions are made – how we help people to have the knowledge and practice to weigh up the most appropriate insights and knowledge to understand the station better, and to adjust in light of that knowledge and context.

Therefore, we need to think about how we can use protocols of teaching and learning to support teachers with the ‘how’. And we, therefore, need to return to efficacy – how are we proactively developing the efficacy through modelling, practice, steps and goals, feedback and the cultural willingness to enable, support and provide for teachers to make informed agentic decisions around this we need to think hardest about. Ultimately, efficacy and agency comes about through action we generate – guided toward, yes, but it has to be our actions.

Thank you for letting me share these thoughts with you.

Why I Wrote a Book on Self-Efficacy for Educators.

I am so excited that book on Self-Efficacy comes out on 31st 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

Powerful Knowledge in the Teaching of Educational Leadership

I’m an academic that  has the privilege of both teaching and researching educational leadership. This blog is a reflection on the last 3 years teaching and designing modules in Educational Leadership at MA Level. It  has been, in part, inspired by taking on my own message that I regularly drill into my PGCE students and through the discussions with the likes of Tom Rees, Matt Evans, Claire Stoneman , Kathryn Morgan and more. That is, we should regularly stop to think about the decisions we make  about what we choose to teach, how we choose to teach it and why.

The blogs and thinking mentioned above has prompted me to reflect on what I teach and why. The what we teach and how we teach it, for me, are as important as each other. In this blog, I will focus on what knowledge I think is particularly transformative for leaders in schools.

The reason for this is because I believe great theory and knowledge is powerful. I believe this for two reasons. First, that powerful knowledge can transform a leaders approach to leadership. Second, that knowledge can promote the criticality our educational leaders need to navigate the field of educational leadership and to make it relevant for their setting.

  1. Powerful knowledge can transform leaders approach to leadership: I believe that, when taught at the right level of criticality and embedded within a developmental andragogical framework, there are theories of understanding people and organisations which can disrupt how we construct a leaders’ understanding of the world around them. Any Science Teacher trained in CASE (Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education) knows the power of threshold concepts to transform how students see Science, and how it can induce conflict into current schema. The idea is no different – powerful knowledge, in the right framework, can transform how we act and therefore how we lead our institutions and the individuals within them.
  2. To develop critical leaders, we need knowledgeable leaders. This knowledge can facilitate individuals to become active in how they consume educational leadership theory. There are some helpful educational leadership theories out there – stretching from the mainstays of Transformational, Distributed and Instructional Leadership models, to newer models such as Woods and Roberts’ Collaborative Leadership. Yet, I believe that contrasting one educational leadership theory against another is  not enough. If we really want our educational leaders to think about what it is to lead a school, we need them to work across the disciplines and think hard about their contexts. Contrasting how in educational leadership theory implicitly discusses the state of organizations, or assumes how people make decisions, gives us a different angle on the underlying theory and its nuts and bolts. Therefore, I believe a rich understanding of individuals and organisations can facilitate individuals to ask deeper, more fundamental questions behind the inherent assumptions within educational leadership theory. This promotes the critical consumption of educational leadership – not as a prescription to be followed, but as a model that needs constant review and development.

So, What is This “Powerful Knowledge”?

In asking this question, we first need to consider what leadership and management is. Leadership is about influence and management about taking responsibility. I argue that, if a leader is to have influence, they need to consider 3 aspects :

  • Individuals: how they come to make decisions and how they interpret the world around them
  • Organisations: funny things happen to people and incidents when they are in an organisational context.
  • I also believe, as Tom Rees stressed,  that we need to think more about EDUCATIONAL leadership -what is it to lead in an educational setting and what knowledge will be powerful to those who lead in schools.

Here are three relevant theories or threshold concepts that, I propose, could form part of a school leader’s powerful knowledge base. In this section,

NB Please note, that by excluding things, I am not saying that other knowledge domains aren’t important. It is just what I choose to prioritise based on my understanding of leadership and school organisations.

  1. Sense-Making

One of the most powerful knowledge bases for educational leaders, l believe, is sense-making. Sensemaking is a whole body of literature that considers how individuals actively construct their understanding of the world when situations are complex. Recent research from myself, Chris James and Sam Carr suggests that headteachers can go about this in fundamentally different ways .  The likes of Karl Weick, and well as adult developmental psychologists such as Kegan, Drago-Severson and Loevinger, and my own research in this area have acted as influential sources in understanding this process.

Understanding Sensemaking is critical for school leaders to understand. Schools themselves are complex places, which are full of wicked problems (See my paper above for greater detail on this). It is in such situations/problems where individuals have to try to comprehend the situation i.e. to Sense-make. Therefore, if leaders are going to work in places such as schools, and they wish to have influence, having knowledge of the process could be an advantage to enhancing their comprehension of others, and thus potential to influence those around them. For example:

  • Understanding sense-making means to embrace the idea that *not everyone comes to understand the world in the same way*. We know from the adult development literature,  that is it is really hard for adults to hold onto this notion!
  • It can also help adults navigate more practical aspects of influence:
    • It can support leaders in consider how their communication to others might be read,
    • how to navigate miscommunication.
    • how it is likely that collectives will try to come to understand the situation.

For example, if you are in a meeting with colleagues trying to comprehend a situation that has just happened. Disagreements over the nature of the problem, the cause and the solution will no doubt appear. Sense-making literature can explain why this is the case, how individuals come to problems differently, and how to resolve it in a way that takes advantage of the different ways of working.

Therefore, theories of sense-making  (what it is, how people engage in it) can provide a useful bank of knowledge to support leaders in both remembering the simple fact that the world is not seen universally, but also provide practical reflections on how to influence such a broad portfolio of experience.

2.Emotions within Decision Making.

Emotion does not receive enough attention. Emotion is critical for how we make decisions. Megan Crawford, Izhar Oplatka and Chris James make an excellent case for focusing on emotion here. Please note, this is not me calling for Emotional Intelligence. Far from it. I am talking about …

  • Supporting leaders to distinguish the difference between Mood (Long term), Feeling (short term) and Emotion (how we process).
  • How emotion can drive cognition. We can easily fall into the trap that our thoughts generate feelings. Yet, anyone with any understanding of CBT knows that emotion and cognition exist in a loop. Understanding emotion puts a spanner in the works of that thought is a simple linear arrow to feeling. It forces leaders to stop, reflect and think about how those around them are likely to be wor king on a response.

Why do I stress emotion for educational leaders? Because, as Megan Crawford  makes the case ,  schools present particular challenges in emotion. For example, schools are guardians of the future and the act of teaching itself can require bountiful amounts of emotional labour. Emotion isn’t a side-affect of how we think – it can drive how we think. Emotion is thus rife in school organisations and will therefore provide a key driver in how/why people do what they want to do. Through this understanding, I believe, leaders could respond more appropriately to this around them – and its in schools where this is exceptionally relevant.

For a practical situation, imagine a leader fluent in the understanding of emotion. How might they interpret or handle a situation? A parent dispute say, or a disagreement with a Head of Department over how to improve the Key Stage 3 Curriculum? Could the knowledge of emotion help leaders to empathise and, thus, communicate in a way that helps them to engage with the other person on a deeper level. I believe this could be so, at least over time and in the right framework.

3.Complexity Theory

Another powerful group of knowledge is that of organisational theory. In particular, the power of Complexity Theory. In my experience, most educational leadership theorists start with how to change organizations. However , how can we do this if we don’t question how organisations work in the first place?

This is where complexity theory is so powerful – it captures cause and effect, the formation of practice, events and ideas and fundamental principles for organisational life. Understanding and appreciating complexity can disrupt the rational, logical and linear way of thinking that underpinned so many attempts of change and how most adults come to understand the world around them. Matt Evans blog does a great job at applying this to schools and is giving great insight into how this theory can be practically applied to understand schools and can transform how they can be viewed in a totally different way (I will leave practical examples to his blog as it really is a treat!). Hawkins and James’s paper, as well as Keith Morrison’s work, are theoretical attempts to demonstrate its relevance as well.

Conclusion

I hope I have started to make the case for, what I consider to be, powerful knowledge in educational leadership and the role of good theory. I don’t believe we think hard enough about what theoretical knowledge can be powerful in disrupting the practices of the leaders on our programmes. I hope this little contribution is the start of a conversation.

To summarise, I believe there are many nuggets in psychology and organisational theory which can provide a strong, robust platform for shaping the mind, and therefore actions, of school leaders. However, identifying these theories need to come from a genuine understanding of what schools are like as organisations

  • the tasks and challenges that school leaders are likely to face
  • the inherent nature of education itself
  • and the nature of the people that work within them.

Thank you for your attention.