Tips for instilling self-efficacy among students
*There are four main ways teachers can help their students gain self-efficacy and these methods are listed below.
1. Mastery Experiences: Help students increase their self-efficacy by providing them with experiences where they can succeed and achieve their goals; this is the most effective way to boost a students' self-esteem.
2. Vicarious Experiences: Point out instances in class when a student succeeds, thus encouraging other students that they are in fact capable of succeeding.
3. Verbal Persuasion: Give students genuine and encouraging feedback in order to provide them with the strength they need to accomplish a task.
4. Emotional State: Maintain a positive attitude around your students in order to help them develop positive attitudes as well; students with positive attitudes have higher self-efficacy and are more successful than students who have a cynical view of life. Also, teachers can lower the amount of stress their students experience by creating exams and presentations that are not worth a lot of points; students who have low levels of stress often have high levels of self-efficacy.
*Other tips for improving your students' self-efficacy are listed below:
1. Mastery Experiences: Help students increase their self-efficacy by providing them with experiences where they can succeed and achieve their goals; this is the most effective way to boost a students' self-esteem.
2. Vicarious Experiences: Point out instances in class when a student succeeds, thus encouraging other students that they are in fact capable of succeeding.
3. Verbal Persuasion: Give students genuine and encouraging feedback in order to provide them with the strength they need to accomplish a task.
4. Emotional State: Maintain a positive attitude around your students in order to help them develop positive attitudes as well; students with positive attitudes have higher self-efficacy and are more successful than students who have a cynical view of life. Also, teachers can lower the amount of stress their students experience by creating exams and presentations that are not worth a lot of points; students who have low levels of stress often have high levels of self-efficacy.
*Other tips for improving your students' self-efficacy are listed below:
- Allow Students to Make Their Own Choices: Let students vote in order to decide some of the classroom rules such as due dates, assignment topics, and how various assessments are graded.
- Be Willing to Give up Your Time When Needed: Some students may need further explanation of new concepts and it is your job as a teacher to ensure that all of your students understand the lessons you are teaching them.
- Encourage Students to Work Together: Cooperative learning activities that encourage students to work together help students improve both their grades and their self-efficacy.
- Encourage Student Understanding: Help students realize that they do not fail because they are not smart, but instead they fail because they did not follow instructions, spend sufficient time on an assignment, or put enough effort into a particular task.
- Focus on Students' Interests: Connect every lesson with a topic the students are interested in such as music, movies, or technology.
- Give Students Frequent Feedback: It is very important to praise and encourage students often, but only when they earn it. Constantly giving praise to students will take away the credibility of the encouragement being given, so make sure students are only praised when they deserve it.
- Help Your Students Get Organized: By helping your students organize their school papers, they will most likely complete more of their assignments on time, which will help them become more successful in school.
- Help Your Students Set Reachable Goals for Themselves: When students set and meet goals for themselves, their self-efficacy will increase.
- Put Forth Effort and Energy When you are Teaching: Even if you are feeling extremely tired and worn out, you must be enthusiastic when you are teaching your students; if you are not genuinely excited to be in the classroom, you cannot expect your students to be.
- Refrain from Comparing One Student's Success to Another's: Even though this teaching method may raise the self-efficacy of the gifted students, it will most likely lower the self-efficacy of the rest of the class.
- Teach Specific Learning Strategies: Provide students with a plan or a schedule regarding studying for an exam or completing a particular project.
- Use Moderately-Difficult Tasks: If a task is too easy, the students will probably be unmotivated to complete the assignment or will think that their teacher does not believe in their ability to work diligently. However, a task that is too difficult will most likely stress students out and lower their self-efficacy, so it is very important for teachers to assign projects that are slightly more challenging than their students' ability levels.