AVReading Newsletter December: Self Efficacy

 

A few years ago, Tzitel engaged students in a group activity where students had to simply move a full glass of water a few inches.  The catch was that they couldn’t touch the glass.  Instead, they  used five pieces of string, attached to a rubber band that fit around the rim of the glass.  To make matters worse, group members  were blindfolded with one unblindfolded director guiding them through the process.  The struggle is that if an individual pulls on the string to a greater degree than the others, the glass tips.  So not only do the participants have to pull the string at just the right tension, but also do so in sync with one another.  It seemed almost impossible.  I sat and watched for nearly a half an hour while seven groups worked to accomplish the feat.  Tensions began to rise, and you could sense frustration setting in.  Students had been convinced that it simply was not physically possible to accomplish this task.  And then, one group leader suggested that they remove the blindfolds, and attempt the task to just see if it was physically possible. Upon doing so, they were able to do the task quite easily.  Then, they put the blindfolds back on, made a few adjustments, and within a few short minutes accomplished the task. 

It was a huge moment.  For those students, the most factor of success seemed to be the understanding that the task was possible.  Once they saw that it could actually be performed, they were able and willing to take it on.  That is the nature of self-efficacy.  It is the understanding that one can reasonably expect success on a given task.  This can be especially difficult for students who have not had a lot of past success with academic tasks or with reading.  Building a sense of self efficacy comes slowly over the course of many different activities and experiences.  

While there are many different ways to foster self-efficacy, I will begin by focusing on scaffolding as a good starting point.  Scaffolds are any type of aid or activity that allows a student greater access to content that might be challenging to them.  Here are examples of scaffolding that I have used in the past.

Repeated readings. One practice I like to do is to expose students to high level material with some scaffolding (or supportive guides) to make the experience possible for them.  For example, during our unit on the apocalypse, I brought in T.S. Eliots “Hallow Men” for them to read and analyze.  I tell them up front that it is a poem I had studied in college and that it is going to be difficult.  And then we do four readings of it.  The first time, I ask them to read the poem, mark-up at least three things, and rate their understanding on a scale from 1-10.  Then, I tell them to pair up with someone next to them, to read the poem aloud to each other, to share one thing they marked up, and then to rate their understanding again on a scale of 1-10.  Then, I show them a little background information on the poem and the author, and I read the poem aloud to them, asking them to mark up three more things and to rate their understanding again.  Then I post a question on the board-- something like, “What does the last line of the poem mean?”  I tell them to read it once more, to answer the question in writing at the bottom of the poem, and to rate themselves one last time.  We end with both a discussion of the poem and a discussion about what they noticed in their ratings of understanding as they read it each time. 

Pre-Reading Scaffolds.  When I know that a given text will be challenging to students, I frontload the readings in the hopes that by doing so I can reduce a little bit of the cognitive load.  So in our holocaust unit when we had a pretty dense article of “revisionist history,” I began with a paragraph at the top of the reading that gave a general overview and summary along with a directive to focus on one important idea.  

Sentence Starters.  For students who may not have extensive vocabularies of academic language, I typically offer sentence starters-- most often for discussions (and on occasion for essays).  The idea of the sentence starter is to direct the students in their thinking, and provide some academic language to formulate their response.  With our vaping unit, we watched a news story on the dangers of e-cigarettes and students were asked to consider the causes of the problem.  So I gave them the sentence outline, “One cause of _____ is ______.”  Be careful, giving students too much structure can be counterproductive.  Not too long ago, I saw an essay where the teacher had provided a sentence starter for every sentence of the five paragraph essay, making it appear as though the student only had to fill in the blanks with single words or simple phrases and be done.  In the spirit of scaffolding, the experience should stand alongside the activity offering support, not replace the experience all together. 

 

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