Over the course of the semester we have learned a good deal about learning theories, behaviours, teaching, learning, etc. As a student and working towards a teacher as well as just being myself I thought that the things we learned were interesting and pertinent in helping me see things from different views, think about things in different ways, and to better myself in all realms.
Assimilation, fitting new information into existing schemas and accommodation were interesting concepts to me pertaining to learning. Children and adults have both have schemas-basic structures for organizing information. As we acquire new information and have new experiences we try to fit that first into an existing schema. If that doesn’t work we accommodate and create a new schema to file away our new found information. I thought this was an interesting concept because as teachers we can be aware that we are helping students to create new schemas all the time. Think of how many new schemas are formed in the act of learning to read and write!
As we help students learn and create new schemas we often use what is called scaffolding- support for learning and problem solving, usually given one stage at a time. I found that modelling is an excellent way to scaffold. As we model what we want our students to do we give them expectations to follow. It is also important to be aware of our student’s zone of proximal development. This is the zone of which children can master a task with appropriate help. With this I found it successful to push students enough to motivate them to work and figure things out to them, but not to the point where they became repeatedly frustrated because the tasks assigned were too hard.
As children, and teachers alike are successful their self-esteem and self-concept change. Self-esteem is the value each of us places on our own characteristics, abilities, and behaviours. It is an affective reaction- a judgement of self worth, for example feeling good about your baseball skills. If people evaluate themselves positively they have high self-esteem. Self-concept refers to an individual’s knowledge and beliefs about themselves, their ideas, feelings, attitudes, and expectations. It is a cognitive structure that is a belief about who you -for example, believing you are a good baseball player.
A new concept that I learned about this semester and think is very important as a teacher is self-efficacy. This is a person’s sense of being able to deal effectively with a particular task. So it has more to do with judgements of personal capabilities. There are four main sources for self-efficacy:
1. Mastery Experiences. These are our own direct experiences and also the most powerful of the sources. Simply put, if we are successful our efficacy increases, if we fail, it decreases.
2. Arousal. This is physical and psychological reactions causing a person to feel alert, excited, or tense. One way to evaluate this is our reaction when we are given a task. Are we excited, nervous, scared, etc. Emotions that we think are good, being psyched or excited, will raise efficacy while emotions we consider to be negative, being nervous in some cases, lowers efficacy.
3. Vicarious experiences. These are accomplishments that are modeled by someone else. As we identify closely with the model, efficacy increases.
4. Social Persuasion. This can be defined as a “pep talk” or specific performance feedback. This may not sustain efficacy over a long period of time however it can give a persuasive boost. This might include a coach giving an inspiring half time talk or acknowledging that a player can do something they are asked or a teacher encouraging her students to succeed.
A teachers’ sense of efficacy is a teacher’s belief that he or she can reach even the most difficult students and help them learn. This is something that I believe comes with experience as well as willingness to reach out. It also comes with patience, initiative, and industry. Initiative is the willingness to begin new activities and explore new directions. In order to have self-efficacy as a teacher, one must take initiative in their work and in their students. Industry is the eagerness to engage in productive work. Reaching out to students and teaching in general is productive work.
Teaching is truly a great call. The more we are aware and increase our schemas through assimilation and accommodation the better teacher and person in general we will be. It is so important to always continue learning and to have the initiative to better ourselves.
Now that you are aware of the notion of schema and the importance of making this known to learners (i.e., metacognition), how do you plan to do this in your own classroom? What experiences did you have while teaching in the schools that helped you understand better how to foster positive self-efficacy, initiative and industry?
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