Developing Inner Efficacy in Students

This week's article summary is about inner efficacy.

The author defines inner efficacy as an individual’s belief in his/her capacity to do what it takes to meet his/her goals.

It’s about having a Growth Mindset, a strong work ethic, and the confidence in one’s ability to rise above obstacles and challenges.

As I read the article, what stood out to me was the difference inner efficacy and self-esteem, which is often the misguided belief how great someone is without any evidence of achievement.

Too much self-esteem can lead to a Fixed Mindset (if it doesn’t come easy, just give up) and to entitlement (I deserve this because of who I am).

As an educator and parent, I have been influenced by the adage (articulated by many educational pundits) that adults shouldn’t do anything for kids that kids can do themselves--in other words, give kids every opportunity to develop inner efficacy and self-assurance through their actions.

So, as we settle into the routines of school, check yourself to ensure you’re creating a classroom that fosters inner efficacy in your students.

Joe

 

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As a psychologist, I’ve spent nearly 20 years studying how to care for and raise good humans. The overlooked skill I always tell new parents to teach is inner efficacy. Inner efficacy is an individual’s belief in their own capacity to do what it takes to meet their goals. Self-esteem might say, “I’m amazing!” but inner efficacy says, “I have what it takes to figure this out and achieve what I set out to.”

Kids with a strong sense of inner efficacy are more likely to challenge themselves and put in the effort. Rather than blaming external circumstances or some immutable lack of talent for their failures, they’ll focus on factors that are within their control.

Research shows that kids gain inner efficacy from four sources:

The Experience of Getting Things Right: For this to happen, kids have to be challenged at the right level. Pushing them into educational experiences they’re not ready for can be counterproductive. Whenever they worry about not being able to do something, you can promote a growth mindset by telling them: “You’re not there, yet.”

Watching Others Get It Right: It’s important that kids see others they consider similar to themselves in at least some specifics (like age, race or ethnicity, gender identity, interests) achieving similar goals.

Reminders That They Have a History of Getting Things Right: The stories we tell ourselves about the past create our sense of competence about the future. Studies show that people who lean into optimism, have a growth mindset, and believe in themselves often don’t have such different past experiences than their pessimistic peers. They just remember successes more vividly than failures.

A Sense of Calm in Their Bodies: If children feel stressed, queasy, or anxious when faced with challenges, it can be difficult to perform without taking care of that physiological response first. Teaching our kids self-soothing practices like mindful breathing will go a long way to help them become competent at whatever they focus on.

How to help kids build inner efficacy:

Encourage Them to Try at Something They’re Not Immediately Good At: Instead of saying “Practice makes perfect,” because we know that’s not always true — and we’re not actually looking for perfection — remind your child that “Effort makes evolution.”

Clarify to Correct: Don’t just mark mistakes with a red pen and say, “Wrong again, pal.” Instead, try restating, rephrasing, changing the question, clarifying directions, and going over previously learned skills.

Praise with Specificity When It’s Earned: When we say “Good job!” it’s got be sincere and specific. Tell kids when you recognize their real effort, persistence, creativity, independence, and competence. You don’t have to completely erase “good job” from your vocabulary. Just add a bit more detail, like, “Good job applying that chess opening you just learned.”

Point Out Strategy: Help kids draw the line between the action and the achievement. If your child does a good job writing an essay they’ve outlined, for example, you can say, “I noticed you made an outline. I bet that’s one reason you did so well.” Or, alternatively, you might need to say, “I noticed you didn’t do an outline. It can be really tough to write an essay when you don’t have an outline. Let’s try writing one together.”

When kids understand that their failures aren’t due to permanent limitations, there’s an opening for future achievement.

Helping Students to Disagree Respectfully

This week's article summary is How Teachers Can Build Civility as a Classroom Norm.

Learning how to respectfully disagree is becoming an obsolete skill.

Our reliance on technology has made us more polarized and less open to opposing viewpoints. Think of how brazen people are online versus in person.

And when we use technology for news, entertainment, or social media, we get constant validation of our views because the apps we use, wanting us to stay on their site, provide us with options that match our previous choices. Pandora, Netflix, and Flipboard know me better than my wife!

Yesterday’s TTW included a letter to parents about how Trinity will handle the upcoming presidential election. Not that long ago schools looked forward to presidential elections, typically having all-school student voting and presidential debates in class. It was a fun way to have kids learn about the elements of democracy, including the right to vote. It didn’t matter which candidate won the school vote (or the actual election for that matter); it was more about learning about how our government operated.

Now, however, classroom discussions about politics run the risk of enflaming either side.

The article below refers to our current age as a time of outrage culture where two sides of an issue (like those in the upcoming presidential election) can’t stomach the other side and abhor ideas different from theirs.

For us as an elementary school, we’re lucky that our students are usually respectful and caring toward one another. We stress sharing and caring as a school value.

But as I read this article, I recognized that we need to be even more overt with our students in explaining and practicing how to disagree respectfully. Part of our character foundation building is getting kids to see that not everyone thinks alike. While our kids are at a developmental age in which they assume everyone lives the same kind of life they do, we help them see difference through collaborative learning as well as through windows and doors.

As our kids move into middle/upper school and college, they will need the skills to navigate a complex, varied, and ambiguous world. Let’s hope that in the not too distant future we can begin to be more civil and inquisitive towards others and difference.

 Joe

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At their best, classroom conversations can engage students, build communication and critical-thinking skills, and help students connect learning to their lives.

But so-called “outrage culture"—in which students react collectively in disproportionate and intensely negative ways during disagreements—can derail attempts to have substantive conversations about divisive or challenging topics.

Michael McQueen, a psychologist and the author of Mindstuck: Mastering the Art of Changing Minds, spoke with Education Week about ways educators can help defuse overreactions and outrage culture among students.

Why do we react so negatively when someone disagrees or we are told we are wrong?

The challenge is that our instinctive minds respond to psychological threats the same way they do physical threats. This response to physical threats has kept us alive for millennia: A tiger jumps out, you run, you stay alive. That’s been great for us as a species. The challenge is that when our instinctive minds are confronted with ideas, information, perspectives, data that are confronting, uncomfortable, or unfamiliar, we respond in the same way.

But we don’t go into fight and flight. We go into denial or defensiveness.

These dynamics so often play out for all of us as humans, but particularly with young people who still don’t have complete development of that frontal part of their brain, which is where the more reasoned, measured, linear part of our thinking apparatus lives.

How can teachers establish structures for more difficult conversations with their students?

Life is complex and nuanced. For teachers, one of the most important things they can do is build the skill of intellectual curiosity and humility in young people.

One of the precursors is that sense of psychological safety—that if I acknowledge that I don’t know the answer, that I hadn’t thought this through, that there are things I doubt—that I’m safe enough to do that. I think teachers modeling this stuff is incredibly helpful. So a teacher may say, “You know what, this text we’re going to study—personally, I find this a really confronting text, but we’ll stick with that, and that will be OK.”

A lot of schools are trying to add specific instruction in social-emotional skills to their curriculum. Do you think that’s the best approach?

The tricky thing is often those lessons become principles in a vacuum. And so there’s not that connection between what I’m learning in math class and English and geography and the politics embedded in geography and history and how that plays into ideology. 

Ideally, you want to arm students with not just a set of skills but a lens through which they see the world. And I think the best way to do that is to give them that lens to hold up every time they’re looking at any number of different topics or subject areas, rather than just describing a set of principles or ideas. Each time you teach subject-matter content, there are micro-moments where you get the chance to model some of these principles and ideas of civil disagreements and intellectual curiosity and ask the questions that allow young people to think differently, to see those nuanced perspectives. If you separate it out as a class in its own right, it can all very quickly become ideas that make sense but don’t apply to something the students are living and seeing every day.

How can a teacher de-escalate a challenging conversation that has spiraled out of control?

We often assume that when someone doesn’t agree with us that there’s a knowledge gap; if we can just educate them better or give them more information or better data, they’ll see the light and they’ll change their perspective. That’s so often not the reality. And in fact the challenging thing is, coming to agreement is often about how do we address the things that are causing the other person to be stubborn, rather than trying to pile on more information or logic in a way that leaves them no option but to change their perspective.

There’re practical things you can do in that moment. First is not respond in kind from an emotional standpoint. Sometimes, we assume that we need to match someone’s emotional intensity if we’re going to have a robust conversation. But actually the best thing that a teacher can do is stay incredibly calm and listen through, not listen to, what they’re saying, to find what’s going on that’s triggered this incredibly strong response, this defensiveness, or this defiance. People who are listened to are more likely to listen. 

 

Classroom Changes Regarding Student Cellphones

This week's article summary is Why I Changed My Mind About Cellphones in the Classroom.

As we talked about in preplanning, elementary schools really haven’t had to deal much with student personal devices, except perhaps the increase of younger kids having smartwatches.

The article was written by a high school teacher who for the previous fifteen years had been bullish on how technology would transform education and student learning.

Fifteen years ago many schools went all-in regarding technology in the classroom, including becoming one-to-one schools. My wife’s school (a stand-alone high school) opted to be a BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) school,  because it didn’t want the expense of or its technology department’s personnel bandwidth to support student technology. You can imagine how disastrous this decision was. Classrooms became a technology free-for-all, and teachers struggled with cheating and fair use issues.

Like the advent of any new technology, most of us were hypnotized by the boundless potential of technology in schools but neglected to consider what the adverse consequences could be—a 21st Century Pandora’s Box.

This past summer the pendulum dramatically swung with many schools, especially middle and high schools, banning the use of student personal devices during the school day.

A number of us a few weeks before preplanning  watched the documentaries Childhood 2.0 and Anxious Nation. Many of us (and a lot of our parents) also read the hugely popular book The Anxious Generation.

The gist of all three is that over-use of technology for elementary and middle school children is damaging to their social-emotional development.

As I discussed in preplanning, Trinity has always emphasized the importance of face-to-face collaborative, cooperative classroom activities, as the process of learning is a social endeavor.  While technology is used in the classroom, we used it in age-appropriate ways as one of many instructional tools.

All of us recognize the use of and access to technology will continue to escalate.

It’s up to us as educators to help kids use technology as one tool for learning while making sure they don’t become overly dependent on it.

Joe

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More than a decade ago, I attended a workshop about technology tools in schools. Speakers discussed how new technology would transform classrooms. One memorable speaker extolled cellphones as a “powerful computer in the students’ pockets” that could revolutionize classroom learning.

“These kids could have incredibly powerful computers in their pockets,” I thought. “Why shouldn’t they use this amazing tool to take photos, videos, create, research—more than I can imagine!” We just needed to address teachers’ reticence to tech and students’ inequitable access.

So my writing partner, Shara Peters, and I wrote an essay for Education Week where we quoted the speaker in: “The Powerful Computer in Your Pocket,” and talked about bringing smartphones to the classroom.

To give our past selves the benefit of the doubt, our optimistic vision may have been possible at that moment. Phones and the internet are so different now from what they were then. Social media was younger, comprised of posts of people you knew. AI-generated images were toddlers. Siri was a newborn.

In recent years, I have thought a lot about this article. I hear the phrase “powerful computer in your pocket,” and it doesn’t feel good. I now believe smartphones should just not be in classrooms.

At the schools where Shara and I are administrators, students are no longer allowed to use their phones. We are not alone. As I write this reassessment of my past ideas, Los Angeles public schools have recently banned cellphones in classrooms starting in the 2025 school year, and New York City schools are considering similar action. At least seven states have now enacted restrictions on student cellphone use in school, with other statewide action in the works.

At my middle school, we came to the decision to keep phones out of classrooms two years ago, based on emerging research, as well as personal experience watching students’ attention pulled away from their peers, from their work, and from their teachers.

When I championed smartphones in the classrooms in 2013, the education world was at the height of pro-tech in classrooms.

Everything was shiny and tech-focused. But in the years since, a renewed focus on hands-on learning has offered a different model.

I wouldn’t say that you can’t get joy from a computer or from one of those “computers in your pocket.” I mean, we’ve all watched one of those videos that makes you laugh till you cry or seen an impressive one made by a student. And for all our concerns about the mental health toll of social media use, many students have found a support system in online communities on their devices—communities that are important outlets for them.

But pound for pound, there is something joyful, personal, and, dare I say, truly soulful, about touching things in the world as they play, build, and create rather than only doing so through a screen. There is time enough for them to learn to transform the world again through technology in ways we can only imagine.

I don’t regret that Shara and I wrote the essay. What works in education changes with time and research, and we need to be flexible in response. What would be a problem is if I were still saying the kids had powerful computers in their pockets and I thought it would be great if middle schoolers were Snapchatting each other in the bathroom during passing periods. Back in 2013, Shara and I didn’t know then what we know now about the incessant demands of a cellphone and how just having a phone near you can be a learning distraction.

We understand better now how technology affects people, and how we interact with it in an education setting needs to reflect our knowledge of its effects on the brain. Kids making music and movies on their devices is great. We need to find a way to harness that creative potential and continue to access the depths of information available online. We also need to be thoughtful about our students’ use of AI (and our own).

But we also need to balance those features with the human need to interact with others, reflect, touch (real) grass, use cardboard and paper, cut with scissors, interact directly with the world, employ physicality, and activate the self and soul. We can’t monitor how screens are used at home, but leaving the phones outside the classroom allows for some balance for kids.

We need to find a way to make this balance happen. Technology is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean it has to take over in every circumstance, including and especially in schools. Our kids’ brains just aren’t always ready for the fire hose of information that comes through their phones. When determining that correct balance, we could do with a bit more joy, resilience, a whole-child thinking. We don’t throw out the tech, the tools—we teach the skills and help them to create that balance for themselves.

But does that mean students should have a powerful computer in their pockets while they are in classrooms? Apologies to my 2013 self, it does not.