Last week I began a series on efficacy – learner, teacher, and leader efficacy. At its’ simplest form, efficacy is the “capacity or power to produce a desired effect”. It comes from confidence, knowing, risking, failing, succeeding, each driven by a mindset that I can, I have, and I will.
Efficacy is developed. It can’t be incentivized by external rewards. Efficacy is an inside out proposition. In fact, motivational theorists seeking to understand intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation birthed the efficacy research. Self-efficacy underpins most if not all expressions of efficacy.
Individuals have to be motivated to learn before actual learning takes place, during the process of learning and after the task has been learned.
In order to increase self-efficacy beliefs we need positive and encouraging role models. Students, teachers, and administrators need to be taught what it looks, sounds and feels like to have high self-efficacy beliefs.
If you are around people that are positive, confident in their own abilities you tend to be motivated to strive for better – whatever the task.
Cultivating an environment that builds and supports efficacy in self as well as others can be awkward. This is especially true given not everyone has the same levels of self-efficacy beliefs.
Albert Bandura, psychologist, responsible for the development of social learning theory, identified four sources of efficacy. They are 1) mastery experience, 2) social persuasion, 3) physiological states, and 4) vicarious experience.
I would like to look at each briefly with the explicit purpose of developing how we, together can begin to build more efficacious educators and learners.
Mastery experience is considered the most influential of the four. Mastery experience is referring to an individual’s previous success at a given task. A critical first step towards mastery is engagement in tasks and activities. Mastery experiences happen when you reach the point where you understand the content knowledge or skill enough to apply or perform it on your own. It happens with plenty of prior exposure to the content. You are able to interpret the results of your actions and use those results to develop your capability to engage in future actions or tasks.
You are able to participate in tasks on a first hand basis with little or no assistance from outside influences. Through a strong mastery experience, you are able to get feedback on your own learning capabilities. This is where confidence begins to fuel your action – you know you can and will based on the knowledge that you have.
Our collective experience with mastery learning is tainted given how the accountability system in North Carolina as well as across the country were interpreted and implemented.
The shortsightedness of determining the quality, effect of teaching and learning by a single measure created a mindset of episodic or erratic learning. Covering material, cramming and the like are not the strategies that bring about mastery learning.
In fact, simply covering material for compliance sake and hoping students retain it actually works against efficacy.
I am not suggesting that teachers mindlessly cover material or “cram” for EOG or EOC assessments.
Rather, I am saying that the mindset created by using the results of EOG or EOC assessments only to make judgments for both teacher and learner create an obstacle for mastery learning and efficacy.
Hence, we need a different mindset to build efficacy – especially for teaching and learning. That mindset must set aside the pressure albeit external or self-imposed to use single measures of performance as the only measure. To achieve mastery leading to efficacy takes engagement, experience, and capacity in skill and knowledge. It takes time. Moreover, it takes a relentless pursuit of competency in foundational skills, application of these skills leading to new learning, and clear and focused aim on enduring habits of learning, for learning, achieved by learning.
Next, I will begin to unpack efficacy through vicarious experience, physiological states, and social persuasion.