March 20, 2007 7:08 AM

The Importance of Confidence and Student Success

As I said in my last blog, this spring term finds students feeling overall and generally more confident than they felt in the fall and winter, mostly owing to the fact that they have two terms successfully behind them or two athletic seasons successfully behind them. They stand on the precipice of the next academic year really, and they feel it as summer simmers slightly beyond the horizon.

Clearly, the success of the fall and winter has engendered this confidence and, naturally, the confidence will engender itself still more success, thus creating what in education is the fundamentally important cycle: success breeding confidence breeding success.

The difficulty and the challenge is this: how to make students successful initially? Of course, after more than half of a year of sustained success, they can feel confident, but how does a teacher enable a student to feel confident early in the year? The task is daunting, but crucial.

Fortunately, at Mercersburg, we tend to attain students who are essentially confident to begin with, but that might seem too simple a solution, and I think, when it comes to discussing the relationship between success and confidence in a given discipline, it may well be. General personal confidence does not always translate into specific confidence in one's ability in a specific field of knowledge or a specific set of skills.

One approach is to make the student successful immediately, and this can be done through review of material that the student already knows or by giving them tasks that are handily accomplished. However, that only extends so far and may be a surface remedy for a teacher/ student dynamic that must endure for an entire year of work and trial. I am not suggesting abandoning review of material, but rather suggesting something more is needed to build students' confidence.

I suspect the crucial aspect of building a student's confidence in himself or herself begins with, before he or she can become successful genuinely, a careful and purposeful establishment of the student's confidence in the teacher. This is no magic trick, but it borders on being one. It does not always happen and it does not happen with every student every year. Nevertheless, it is a key to a student's success.

What is most tricky about it, I suspect, is that it involves establishing some level of authority, and, frankly, "authority" is a loaded word and a loaded psychological dynamic between people. Building confidence in the teacher involves other more abstract things like trust, and by saying
"abstract" I do not intend to be dismissive--Trust is essential.

Establishing authority and trust are the starting points for the effective teacher, we all know, but how to do those things are not so knowable. As in most professions, it takes years of experience in cultivating the skills to accomplish these very goals.

For this reason, it is most pertinent to value those experienced teachers who are able to create confidence in themselves for their students.  I feel fortunate to teach at a school where so many teachers are like this and I value them as colleagues.