Tag: self-efficacy

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