Reflection for Topic 3: Self-Efficacy & Belief Systems Reflections

“Please reflect on the ways in which your understanding of how students’ beliefs in their abilities to learn affect their achievement and persistence. Describe a specific change you will make in your course to challenge students and to build confidence in their academic growth. Do you anticipate potential challenges? How will you try to address these challenges? Also reflect on your own mindsets about students’ learning, and whether they have changed over the years, or as a result of participating in the institute.”

I thoroughly enjoyed exploring this topic with my colleagues and the presentations from the speakers.

Jumping ahead to the final question in this prompt, as I believe it is at the core of learning outcomes, is the idea of Instructor Mindset that came up in Dr. Delaram Totonchi’s presentation. I believe this is integral to student success. Having a genuine and authentic belief in your students’ path to success and reaching mastery of the material is essential along with being flexible with your instruction methods to best support and engage your students.  It comes down to us as educators. Our students enroll in our courses with various goals and it is our role to help them get there by imparting knowledge, skills, and succeeding in our classes. The work of Carl Rogers and the power of authenticity came up for me here and well as the various studies related to expectancy theory,  self-fulfilling prophecy, and the pygmalion effect. Our belief in our students learning transmits to them – often through our behaviors, the way be interact, and communicate that can reinforce their efforts. I expect to be inspired and to learn from my students and their perspectives on the material. To me our students impress me more and more each semester and the pandemic has amplified this. I saw incredible resilience through significant loss and challenges, along with an earnest and inspiring desire to stay on track and finish with success.

Internal Locus of Control is a concept that I am very passionate about communicating to students and I see how this ties into growth mindset. I often refer to it as the “I got this!” mindset. Cultivating this is so important for a variety of life’s experiences, our education, career, our health. And just like resilience, we know this can be taught and with habitual use become more natural. I have taught lectures on Resilience/Resiliency Training in a course teaching Program Development and Evaluation for graduate students and we looked at the “Penn Resiliency Program” as a case study, which is CBT based. Below is a link if you are interested in taking a look – it is designed to be applicable in many sectors. https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/resilience-programs/resilience-skill-set

To return to the beginning questions, “Describe a specific change you will make in your course to challenge students and to build confidence in their academic growth. Do you anticipate potential challenges? How will you try to address these challenges?”

During our institute, a video was shared related to Growth Mindset that especially resonated. It included inspiring rationale and gave purpose to sticking with challenging material. The video is titled “Growing your mind”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtKJrB5rOKs

I would like to introduce this video in the beginning of the semester and highlight key points. I will follow this up with a discussion asking students to share their thoughts and how they believe it may apply to the courses (along with other responsibilities they may be juggling simultaneously). I may also ask if they can come up with a one sentence mantra/affirmation that they can use to remind themselves of the teachings conveyed in this video. Ex) “Hard work strengthens my mind.”