Research School Network: Educational disadvantage and self-efficacy Following an INSET workshop Chris Runeckles shares the details of a session on self-efficacy.


Educational disadvantage and self-efficacy

Following an INSET workshop Chris Runeckles shares the details of a session on self-efficacy.

by Durrington Research School
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Our most recent INSET days at Durrington focused on tackling educational disadvantage. National leader in this area Marc Rowland spoke brilliantly at the start of day one, setting-up for a series of workshops and department time to add the extra layers of detail.

The workshop I led focused on the concept of self-efficacy and how it directly relates to disadvantaged students. It was a tricky session to plan as it dealt with quite intangible ideas. As the recently published EEF guidance report on professional development explains, for classroom change to take place teachers need instruction on how to perform a technique. So when those techniques are hard to articulate the barrier to meaningful and habitual change is pretty high and hard to ascend.

Luckily, we’ve got brilliant staff here at Durrington, and one of them, Fahim Rahman, has helped scale this barrier. He wrote a great blog last week on our sister site Class Teaching explaining how he had brought the ideas from the workshop to life. You can read it here.

To support his reflections, this blog is a summary of my session. Hopefully the two together can provide a useful reference point for educational disadvantage and self-efficacy.

Firstly, what do we mean by self-efficacy? Here are a selection of quotes that I used to articulate its meaning:

Self-efficacy refers to an individual’s belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments. Self-efficacy reflects confidence in the ability to exert control over one’s own motivation, behaviour, and social environment.” Albert Bandura

If you think you can, you probably can. If you think you can’t, well that self limiting and self-fulfilling belief might well stop you doing something you’re perfectly capable of doing.” Albert Bandura

One of the most inspiring things truly great teachers and schools do is instil in children the have a go’ confidence that their more privileged peers naturally pick up from their supportive, middle class homes.” Dr Lee Elliot Major

One element that really clarifies self-efficacy’s meaning to me, is that it refers specifically to what is going to happen in the future. More precisely, our own judgement about how likely it is that we are going to be able to complete a task successfully. It is affected by our self-concept, which is shaped by prior experience, but ultimately it is our belief about the nature of what is to come. It is also completely situational; a student can be in period 1 and have very high self-efficacy completing a creative writing task and then move to the next lesson and have rock bottom self-efficacy for a French listening assessment. This could even be true within a single lesson depending on the different tasks.

Knowing this, and then thinking about that disadvantaged student staring at a year 8 history assessment and saying I can’t do it” really brings home the importance of tackling a lack of self-efficacy in our disadvantaged students.

I exemplified this to the teachers in the session by, prior to defining self-efficacy, first giving them some anagrams to solve and then a maths problem. An English teacher who will remain nameless, helped me out massively by reacting with overt confidence and enthusiasm to the anagrams and then totally the opposite when it came to the maths. Problem exemplified.

We then discussed how low self-efficacy judgement might manifest themselves in our lessons, and particularly in our disadvantaged students. Here we also shared success stories where we had seen the self-efficacy of disadvantaged students that we teach dramatically increase. One notable example came from a teaching assistant who described a student that she read to in the mornings who had gone from a student who flatly refused to engage with books to one who was avidly choosing his next read from the library.

I then shared these graphics which describe the four judgements that according to Bandura determine our self-efficacy judgements and what as teachers we can do to positively effect these judgements.

SE 1
SE 2
SE 3
SE 4

We talked through some practical examples of what this would look like, giving careful consideration to subject specificity. I then shared this summary as the key takeaways:

  • Recognising low self-efficacy can help with addressing it.
  • Our goal is for students to feel capable of completing a task, prior to starting it.
  • What we say and what we show can make a difference to student’s self-efficacy judgements.

What of course I was hoping would happen is what Fahim went and did. Careful reflection on what was said leading to changes to practice in the classroom. What happens next is working across the school to help similar changes manifest themselves in all our classrooms.

Chris Runeckles

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