July 2018 – Teacher Efficacy

[Steven Herder]

Please share what you know or what you want to know about teacher efficacy. We look forward to learning from you and with you!

[Gareth]

For reasons I won’t go into, I have been asking English learners from a variety of countries, cultures and proficiency levels over several months the following question: “How important is it for the teacher to be popular with the students in class?” While this has not been a formal study with statistics, there has been a resounding answer: “It is desirable, but not essential.” In follow-up questions students have explained that the popularity of the teacher has little bearing on the effectiveness of the learning in their opinion. A friendly and approachable teacher is helpful in order to feel more comfortable in contributing in class and asking for more personalised feedback. These students have often gone on to say that a sense of the teacher’s self-confidence and belief in successful outcomes for all is far more important. This seems to lend weight to the idea that teacher efficacy is paramount in the minds of learners when assessing their teacher.

[Philip Shigeo Brown (Phil)]

Thank you Gareth for getting the ball rolling. Your post reminds me of something Steve said years back about how we often first focus on becoming ‘a good teacher’. In EIKAIWA (=’conversation school’ or private language schools) in Japan, this meant being friendly, kind, helpful, patient, encouraging, speaking clearly and understandably. Being organised and having good teaching techniques were also be important among other ‘teaching’ qualities. However, the longer we taught and as we progressed through our Master in TEFL/TESL, we became more focused on what it meant to be ‘an effective teacher’, as you highlight.

In conversations with Steve, especially as he has focused on developing leadership, it has also been eye-opening to see the role that plays and how self-confidence and belief tie-into teacher efficacy and are also fundamental to the ability to lead.

[Philip Shigeo Brown (Phil)]

Useful links

Concordia Faculty (January, 2018) “Teacher Efficacy: Why It Matters and How Administrators Can Help”

Bandura (2006) “Guide for constructing self-efficacy scales”

Nie, Lau, & Liau (2012) “The teacher efficacy scale: A reliability and validity study”
Following Bandura (2006), researchers adapted and incorporated 4 scales:
1. Teacher sense of efficacy scale (based on Tschannen-Moran and Hoy, 2001)
2. Behavior management strategies scale (adapted from the Mathematics Enhancement Classroom Observation Record Scale (MECORS) (Schaffer, Nesselrodt, & Stringfield, 1998)
3. Instructional strategies scale (also adapted from MECORS)
4. Motivational strategies scale (adapted from the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Survey (Midgley, et al., 1995)

[Gareth]

Just had a conversation with Barb and Steven, which went something like this:

Frequently in our training courses we come to know Japanese High School English teachers who are fully aware that their teaching practice is not optimum for their students to reach their goals. At the same time, many of these teachers lack the self-efficacy to change their teaching practice – they simply do not have the belief that they can successfully change. What we can do is strive for an understanding of those teachers who do have the self-efficacy to change. What makes them different? If we can understand that, we can look to help other teachers increase their self-efficacy to change practice.

Maybe this line of thinking is why NLP has suddenly landed in my lap. Everything’s connected. Everything has a reason.

[Philip Shigeo Brown (Phil)]

If you’re interested, I attended the Keys to Success introductory weekend with Dr Richard Bolstad: https://www.transformations.net.nz/

Although the website is a bit dated in appearance, there’s a lot of good quality information. Recently, I’ve been revisiting NLP a little and feel like it’s time to blow out some cobwebs.

I didn’t know until just now that there was actually a JALT Special Issues of The Language Teacher on NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) in 1997:
https://www.jalt-publications.org/tlt/issues/1997-02_21.2

[Philip Shigeo Brown (Phil)]

Chiyuki Yanase recently shared this helpful link on Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE) according to John Hattie

Notably, “Collective Teacher Efficacy is the collective belief of teachers in their ability to positively affect students. With an effect size of d=1.57 Collective Teacher Efficacy is strongly correlated with student achievement.

…

The message seems to be clear: together teachers can achieve more, especially if they collectively believe that they can do so!”

[Author]

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