What's left? Attitude adjustment. Did we spend enough time this summer reflecting on our school experiences to get rid of our tired negative attitudes that may have crept up on us sometime between prom night and the last day of school?
Believe it or not, student, parent, teacher and community attitudes towards learning are highly predictive of student success.
When children have high “self-efficacy” beliefs, that is, the belief that they can accomplish academic tasks, they tend to perform much better in school. They have a clear view of what their strengths and weaknesses are, and they know what they have to do each day to improve their skills and knowledge.
Children who have confidence in their self-efficacy can persist and work hard to solve school problems. They have academic “resilience,” the ability to hang in there when the going gets tough.
There have been many studies that show that parents and teachers need to have high self-efficacy ratings, too, for themselves and for their children if their children are to believe that they are strong learners.
When parents or teachers start with the premise “this child can't learn this,” the child is less likely to learn what is considered within their grasp by education experts. Hence, it is important to foster positive “self-efficacy” beliefs in ourselves as well as our children and our students.
How do we do this? For one, it is very important that materials taught are age and developmentally appropriate. There's no sense in thrusting a third grader into a college level romantic literature class and telling them, “they can do it,” because the material is too advanced for their stage of life. They would not fail, but, they would believe they failed. Teaching materials that are timely to a child's development is key to instilling self-efficacy in each child.
Students must also be taught how to figure out their own mistakes, how to build knowledge by looking for strategies and solutions if they discover they were off-base. To do this, we must teach them to be confident in their study habits, persistent in their goal of understanding, and joyful that they have this God-given ability to learn new things every day.
Why bring this up at the start of the year? I recently attended a celebration at my elementary school. A group of us talked about old times (40-50 years ago) as if we were still living in that era, when nuns slapped the wrists of naughty students, and publicly berated students for missing answers in ways that were so cruel, my classmates still felt the sting when we gathered on that reunion
Many of my peers had parents and teachers who told them over and over “you are not college material.” They did not go to college. My own parents were oddly different, expecting us to do our school work, and to prove our smarts by reading big books and writing from our imagination. “You can do anything you put your mind to,” was their mantra whenever we were discouraged about our homework or our standing at school.
When kids come to school today, they need to know that they ARE capable of learning, and that they will gain much by believing in their own hard work in the classroom and at the homework table. They need to know that making mistakes is a huge part of learning. Children should be encouraged to make many mistakes, and taught how to fix their own mistakes.
No question, the start of the school year is the best time for us to renew our partnership as parents, teachers, and the community responsible for educating all our children. As we do so, let's promise each other to teach our children self-efficacy, and help them, thereby, to develop a deep and lasting love of learning.
Author's note: Last week I said Louisiana pays schools based on a single head count day. In fact, the state bases it's payment on three head-count days, but the principle and the outcomes are the same: lower attendance rates and lower school performance scores.
Copyright August 6, 2014
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