As Bandura says, things that are achieved easily will not necessarily serve as experiences to develop self-efficacy. Developing resilience in the face of setbacks and frustrations is the more important element. It’s the principle that applies in the many People who have a low sense of efficacy in given domains shy away from difficult tasks, which they view as personal threats. They have low aspirations and weak commitment to the goals they choose to pursue. When faced with difficult tasks, they dwell on their personal deficiencies, the obstacles they will encounter, and all kinds of adverse outcomes rather than concentrate on how to perform successfully. They slacken their efforts and give up quickly in the face of difficulties.
They are slow to recover their sense of efficacy following failure or setbacks. Because they view insufficient performance as deficient aptitude, it does not require much failure for them to lose faith in their capabilities. They fall easy victim to stress and depression.
In contrast, a strong sense of efficacy enhances human accomplishment and personal well-being in many ways. People with high assurance in their capabilities in given domains approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. Such an efficacious outlook fosters intrinsic interest and deep engrossment in activities. These people set themselves challenging goals and maintain strong commitment to them. They heighten and sustain their efforts in the face of difficulties. They quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures or setbacks. They attribute failure to insufficient effort or to deficient knowledge and skills that are acquirable. They approach threatening situations with assurance that they can exercise control over them. Such an efficacious outlook produces personal accomplishments, reduces stress, and lowers vulnerability to depression.
Albert Bandura 1995:11
Figure 17: Albert Bandura text
sorts of outward bound and physical activities designed to challenge young people, not only physically, but emotionally as well.
Assisting young people towards a mastery orientation can have a two-fold approach. Firstly, as in the example above, it can be providing young people with challenging experiences where they can achieve mastery. They may not be as phys-ically stretching as outward bound activities, but in my experience one of the most effective in confidence building is when young people are put in a position of having to mentor or ‘teach’ their peers or young children. Appendix 2 gives an example of how a school has integrated many opportunities for mastery experiences by means of mentoring, counselling and leadership of younger pupils.
On the other hand, it might be thought a risky strategy to take young people who would normally ‘play up’ in a school environment, and place them in a primary classroom with the expectation that they are going to lead younger children in learning. Yet the rewards are usually worth the risk. There can be so many elements to the experience. It can generate a sense of responsibility when young people are faced with a group of children much smaller than themselves, all gazing up at them in expectation. It can help them recognize their own knowledge and abilities when seen in relation to the less developed abilities of much younger children. It is not a particularly risky strategy in relation to setting young people up to fail, because younger children will usually be very accepting and admiring of a teenager. Faced with the responsibility, the experience usually draws the best out of young people.
The subject of their ‘teaching’ is really the less important factor – it can be about a particular interest of theirs or what it will be like when the children go to high school.
The more important outcome is that de-briefing on the experience can help even the most diffident young person recognize the resources of knowledge and skill they can draw upon when required.
Thinking Space 11
Quote from a teacher talking about students teaching a class: ‘The key principles which appeared most clearly here were that involvement and excitement occurred when learning was self-directed and initiated by personal choice of the student’.
Carl Rogers and Jerome Freiberg 1994:87
The second approach is helping young people identify things they have already learned to do, to draw out the features they can replicate elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the young man in the example above who was nicking cars should be encouraged to repeat that activity to gain experience in mastery! But if he was good at it, he could be encouraged to deconstruct the elements of skill and knowledge to gain an understanding of his capability to overcome obstacles.
Stage: 3 Re-awakening the Flow of Learning
133
Young people may not yet have recognized that the skills they develop in part-time jobs or leisure activities can be attributes they can productively transfer to other areas of achievement. Once we have learned something, it is difficult to return to a state of ‘not knowing’: we operate in a state of ‘unconscious competence’ which is one reason why it is difficult for professionals like teachers to describe what they do.
Once an activity has been thoroughly ‘learned’ we tend to function intuitively, as with driving a car, riding a bicycle or touch typing. I never learned how to cook from my mother because every time I asked her how much of a particular ingredient to use, she always said, ‘Oh – you know’. Well of course I didn’t ‘know’, that’s why I was asking, and she was unable to tell me because she had become so practised that she handled the ingredients as if by instinct.
There will be things that young people have learned, masteries they have experienced, where they have forgotten how they first learned. They also may not fully appreciate how many different components there are to the learning. I’m not really talking about the recording of Key Skills or Competences here, although these formal processes have a role. Rather, the unpacking of a mastery experience can be used in coaching to illustrate the full extent of learning achievements, as in the example of David.
David had not been a high achiever academically, and he lacked confidence in that area, but he was a very good footballer. The day before I met with the coaching group he had scored what proved to be the winning goal for the school team, and I picked up on this when we were having a discussion about the different ways we learned.
‘Take David’, I said to the group, ‘what different sorts of learning did he have to use to score that goal yesterday? He gained the ball to start with by tackling another player, so he would have to know how to use just the right amount of force, the angle and speed to do that safely. Then, at the same time as retaining control of the ball at his feet, he had to look up and judge the distance to the goal. He would be using his knowledge to assess whether any wind speed would affect the flight of the ball, and whether it needed a curving or a straight trajectory. In the same instant, he would be assessing the position of the goalkeeper and the other players, and predicting the way they would be likely to move once he kicked the ball. Then using just the correct amount of muscle power, and at the same time maintaining his balance, he kicked the ball so that it arched over the head of the defenders, past the goalkeeper, into the back of the net. ‘Now’, I added emphatically, ‘that‘s what I call intelligent behaviour.’
Finally, addressing a question directly to David I asked, ‘Tell us David, did you always score every time you took a shot at goal?’ Of course David had to say he didn’t, there had been many, many times when he’d kicked for goal and not suc-ceeded, but of course that hadn’t meant he gave up trying. And naturally it had taken a great deal of practice to achieve his level of expertise.
Thinking Space 12
The most helpful kind of counter is the kind where you discover that the solution is already happening anyway – right under your nose – although for some reason you hadn’t recognized it as such. This sounds rather unlikely perhaps but this is one of the central tenets of solutions-focused work’
Paul Jackson and Mark McKergow 2007: 59
If nothing else, this was articulating for David his degree of mastery, and helping him to think about how he could apply the features of this experience in other domains – particularly in relation to the need for resilience in persevering. For the rest of the group, it was a useful metaphor around which to focus a discussion on how other activities – even those more mundane than scoring a goal – also combined a range of elements that would have had to be ‘learned’, but which they had come to take for granted. You may want to think of an illustration of your own – an activity that you know a young person has learned to do – from which they can ‘model’ the process to see how the elements can be replicated in other areas. The coaching questions below are some that can be used to model the process and tease out the elements:
I’m interested to know how you learned to do that.
I’ve never done that, how do you do it?
Take me step by step through how you do that?
What learning did you have to do to be able to do that?
What do you have to think about when you’re doing that?
What does it feel like when you’re doing that?
What is it important to pay attention to when you’re doing that?
What are you aware of when you are doing that?
What is that an example of?