Thoughts on teaching: CONFIDENCE

As the students prepared for their listening/speaking final, I was trying to help them with each part of the rubric. One of the areas they were being judged on is 'confidence.' They know, and I know that this is a major pitfall for Asian students. I have various theories for why that is. None of them based on much, but I DO want to know where does confidence come from. I've been thinking about this since I was in their position. In high school, it was the thing I wanted more than anything else. Many say that it's positive reinforcement (that's education-ese for compliments, successfully doing something, good grades, admiration, swishing the ball through the net, etc). I think that's true; success breeds success and confidence. I know the areas where I feel confident bordering on cocky and they are the places I've been praised in or have been successful. Yet, how do you explain the phenomenon of some people who have confidence regardless? And what about those people in our lives who break your heart because no matter how many times you tell them, sincerely, that they are great, that they are beautiful and able, still will never believe you, no matter how much positive reinforcement you give them? Something tells me there's more to this confidence-stuff.

This is funny--Scott was telling me a few weeks ago that American students are out-performed by many many countries in the world. But in one area, American students top the charts. Guess what it is? Confidence. Even with not that much to be confident about in their schoolwork, Americans are confident. Confidence surrounds some people like a golden glow. It attracts people to them. That's because confidence is contagious and attractive. Confidence can also save you from having other people exercise their wills over you, keep you working and trying and most important for my students learning language, it keeps you taking risks, not being afraid to make mistakes Positive self-image in one of the leading indicators of success in school, according to one of my education professors. But this kind of confidence seems to be the kind that can be easily lost. Where does the steady-as-she-goes-confidence come from so that mistakes, disappointments or fading good looks can't remove? Are only beautiful, super-talented people entitled to this confidence? What about the self-respect of loving yourself warts and all? How do you teach that? How do you learn it? Aislin says that confidence is a step-child of faith and I think this is tied to knowing you are a child of God. Today, in my setting apart blessing (I'm now the YW 2nd counselor) Bishop counseled me to gain a testimony of the value of my soul because I would need to be able to teach the worth of their soul to the girls in our ward. If anyone has any thoughts on how this works, I would love to know.

I remember in my Education Psychology class talking about self-efficacy or the belief that you can do things. And we talked about how, in the language of statistics, "there is a higher incidence of high self-efficacy among males than females." It's not a huge difference in number but it's enough to be significant. As a teacher, you can see it. In the words of Elder Bednar when he visited our mission, "Generally speaking, sisters should worry less about their inadequacies and efforts and elders should worry more." High self-efficacy keeps you trying things, makes you confident and leads to success in many areas of life.the downsides are tendencies to be over-confident or blame everything else instead of admitting they have weaknesses or need to improve. For example, "I didn't make the team because coach hates me" or "I could've done it, I just didn't want to" or "I didn't do well because math/English/history/science is stupid." Oh. Naturally. Sometimes people with high self-efficacy are crushed and shaken when they don't do as well as they hoped. They can have a small identity crisis over it.

On the other end, low self-efficacy can lead you to take constructive criticism, take responsibility to improve and ask for help. But, on the downside, people with low self-efficacy constantly fish for compliments and rarely believe them. They feel like their efforts and the success in their life is shadowed by some kind of inescapable doom. Some examples can be a girl who is never satisfied no matter how weight she loses or a student needing the teacher to hold their hand through every part of the writing process or math equation. They don't believe they have the capacity to do things themselves. If you see tendencies for both of these types in you, you're probably a normal human being.

I remember one guy in the EdPsych class raised his hand and said. "That's true. Look at the difference in the General Relief Society and General Priesthood meetings. I think priesthood meeting involves a lot of calls to action and areas to improve, while the relief society meeting often has themes of recognizing the divine within you, feeling the love of God, etc. This doesn't mean, necessarily that men have to improve and women don't. It's just the method of helping us improve that is different. I thought he was pretty insightful.