I often share stories of my personal failures when i was starting out in the industry and explain that it is a part of learning.I think this helps ease their anxiety on their first day on the job.
I have tried this in my class as well and have had alot of success with lifting self doubt.
Every one have their weak and strong strenghts. No one is better than other. As an instructor I always show the positive. Some students like the subject for their intrinsic motivation and some like the recognition and awards. So as an instructor I should make the teaching topic interesting and when possible give practical example. If a student try to improve the class performance that student should receive some rewards.
This is something as instructors we deal with regularly. I tend to start the day off with a story which is from some current relation to that days topic and corelate it to our lesson for the day.
I had a student in a Phlebotomy Course who was absolutely terrified of sticking someone with a needle, to the point that he was self-sabotaging himself in the classroom. After much one-on-one, and much encouragement from his peers, he found that he was actually very good at drawing blood from individuals.
It is awesome to get students past their self doubt! I teach freshman basic design classes, I always have an opportunity to show students they know more than they think they know.
First, I make a game out of which student I am going to pick on to ask a question in class. Then when asked, if I can see they really don't know the answer I say to them "you're allowed to say I don't know. Because if you did know, why would you be here!" This does a few things at once, first it simply speeds up my question and answer session, secondly, it puts the students at ease and prevents embarrassments or self doubt when they are asked a question they do not know in front of their peers.
I try to let students come to the understanding that when learning a new skill it is not important to be "good" or proficient right away but that it is important to gain familiarity and experience. Repetition and gained experience will lead to confidence and reward. It's ok to try and "fail". There is no other way to gain the knowledge they are seeking.
I have found it helpful to speak with students before they attempt a new task.This gives me a
reading of the students mind set.If I pickup any
self-doubt I can address at this time.
i also have told the students that we all make mistakes but is how you deal with it that counts own up to it and go on.
I couldn't agree more! When that light bulb goes off and you can see the student getting the material and growing in confidence - it's the best feeling!
i do agree with this statement. i have a group of students that show a great deal of self-doubt in there class work. I do believe that for some of them they have never been told they can. It was very hard to get them to buy into the class at the start but showing them where to find the information about a marketing plan has really helped
I usually let students know right at the beginning that they are going to make mistakes. I encourage asking of questions and let the students know I am here to help them get back on track.
I have on occasion, shared stories of my own self doubt, and how I found my way through those times. One of my teachers in the early years after high school, told me;" believe you can, or believe you can't, either way your right". One thing I soon believed was that this teacher cared about me as a person, and that he would be there to help me over the seemingly insurmountable hurtles, that he once stood in trepidation of. Believe in your students! It's contagious!
Self-doubt: A self-imposed learning blocker
ED112
Facilitator: James Jackson
By Randall Aungst
12/10/2012
Proposed Issue:
One of the greatest rewards in teaching is helping students discover their potential in spite of their self-doubt. Discuss some particular examples of cases, past or present, where this perception was clearly evident.
Having gone back to school at a late age myself I have a first-hand experience with the trials and tribulations of the adult college student. When I first began as an instructor I was hired to teach a class designed to orient new students to coming back to school. There were, in my view, three issues that were important to integrating a successful school experience into the life of an adult learner. First there must be an exploration of them. Second there must be an understanding of their destination. Third there must be an understanding of the campus. Each of these issues has many facets. For this discussion I would like to address primarily how I begin to guide them through self-discovery as the content of my second class session is particularly relevant to the proposed issue.
The first class session is composed of an introduction to me, my background, why I am their guide and the course expectations and guidelines. My goal in the second session is to address certain common characteristics to adult learners returning to school and identify for the students how adults learn and how learning is achieved. This is done to both set the students mind at ease, as they begin to realize that, “no man is an island,†and that the anxieties that they feel are being felt by their peers as well.
The following are excerpts from that second session that I find relevant to the proposed issue:
Necessity is the first aspect of adult learning. The reason for this is typically learning does not exist in a vacuum. Just like necessity is the mother of invention, so it is with learning as well. In most cases learning is a result of some type of pressure that exists, be that pressure external, internal, individually relevant or socially relevant. On a personal scale the pressure could be generated by the need to retrain for employment, provide better for one’s family, get a promotion at work, provide better living arrangements or simply to live up to family expectations. No matter what the origin of the pressure is, it creates a need within the individual that must be met.
The second stage in adult learning is a positive mindset. Regardless of what type of learning is to take place the attitude of the learner must be one that promotes a positive frame of mind. Depression in and of itself, and this can be confirmed by anyone that has experienced mild or extreme depression, is a vacuum and considering that learning does not exist in a vacuum, frame of mind is paramount for learning to take place. This is due to the fact that it takes motivation to initiate the act of learning and depression by its very nature eliminates motivation or sucks it up like a vacuum.
Finally preparedness is a key to adult learning. While someone might have the need and be in a positive place in their mind if they are not prepared to undertake such a journey the journey is not realized. Take the example of an individual in a job that makes enough money to provide for their family. While most would like to provide better, and understand that in order to do so it is necessary to learn new skills and improve their marketability to advance, there are many that are not prepared to undertake such an endeavor either due to lack of confidence or fear of failure. This can be overcome through various degrees of internal or external motivation such as a mandate from an employer.
Experiential learning as the cornerstone for adult learning it is important to understand, for this school of thought, that experience comes in two forms personal and vicarious. Everything that an individual learns is through experience, experience in a classroom or experience in the real world. Experience in a classroom takes place in the form of vicarious learning.
Let me explain.
Adults have practical real world experiences, including that of prior education experiences, to relate the learning through. As a result they are able to create a vicarious learning experience rather than that of primary experience through relating the process to a prior experience they have had and drawing a parallel to the topic at hand. This allows for a more advanced and relevant form of learning to take place. Further it is the experiences that an adult has that allow them to critically reflect upon the learning leading to transformational learning of one’s perceptions. Take for example someone learning to be an electrician. During grade school science they learned about the flow of water and other elements relating to the physical world. They also learned about electrons and the makeup of atoms. This experience allows them to draw parallels between the flow of water and the direction of water flow to the flow of electrons through a circuit. The epiphany of this parallel is paramount to the understanding of electricity and how it moves from one place to another making it much easier to conceptualize the process. What has taken place is a vicarious learning experience. The student has learned vicariously through the experience of the instructor by relating the knowledge to prior experiences they have had and critically reflecting on those two aspects to create an epiphany.
This is what I am hoping to do with you; through effective two way communication I am hoping to be able to relate to you so that you can relate to the information given and learn what is needed.
The two most important factors in succeeding in college have nothing to do with your IQ, how long it’s been since you’ve been in school or how you did the last time you were in school. What they have to do with are motivation and learning skills. In other words keep your eye on the prize and maintain your focus while continually striving to improve and diversify your learning skills. The project due Monday is all about learning skills and the chat from last Tuesday covered learning skills in depth.
So what does it take to maintain focus and increase learning skills? Primarily, as a student you need to set yourself up to be successful.
Taking responsibility and holding yourself accountable for your own learning is the first step to setting yourself up for success. In other words, the school resources, your instructor, your text book and so on are tools for you to learn by; as opposed to your learning tool box, covered in the last chat, that are your tools to learn with. Let me put this in another way. In order to be an instructor there is no requirement to be a good public speaker or be able to keep their students entertained, only that they know the subject matter and have the ability to convey that knowledge. Likewise a textbook has no requirement to be, “a good read,†only contain the required information in a way that can convey that information. What I am trying to say is that not all of your instructors will be as charming and easy to deal with as me…. So what does that mean? It means that you must take it upon yourself to get as much out of every class and every textbook as you can. Begin by adopting the assumption that every instructor and text has valuable information that will help you attain your goals, because they do.
Accountability and responsibility also mean that you hold yourself responsible and accountable for both your successes and failures. Life is made up of choices and those choices, good or bad, are yours and yours alone to make. You may not like the choices that you are given but they are yours and they are the only thing in this world that you really have control over. For example: I had a choice as to whether or not I was going to take an active role in getting my wife down to Texas and settled into her new position or let my wife get down there by herself so that I could concentrate fully on my job. I chose to take an active role and as a result it made things much more cumbersome and difficult to do my job. Further I had a choice to pay $50 to get cellular internet for a month during this move or attempt to find Wi-Fi connections along the way and take a chance on not finding it. I chose to take my chances, an option I won’t make again. I take full responsibility for those choices and the consequences that came along with them. The consequence to helping my wife is that I am still married. The consequence to not purchasing cellular internet access is I almost didn’t make one of my chats and had to do it last minute in an IHOP. What I am trying to say is that we all have choices and you as students need to make choices every day that weigh the consequences of doing your homework or attending chats or whatever against the consequences of doing something else. When you choose not to turn in homework on time your instructors will have the choice of taking your reasoning for making your choice and not penalizing you for being late or rejecting your reasoning for your choice and penalizing you for being late. But in either case it was your choice to be late. Sometimes the choice is indirect, such as choosing to do something that ultimately got your car impounded by the police with your computer in the back. While this choice was not, “do I turn in my homework on time or not,†it had a contribution to the future choices you had to make regarding your homework.
The next step in setting yourself up for success is goal setting. I am not going to go into that topic right now, it will be covered in a future chat, other than to say make sure the goals that you set can be tracked, are measurable and are moderately challenging but attainable. These are very important so that you build your confidence in yourself by meeting challenges and attaining goals.
Attitude counts when setting yourself up for success. Attitudes are learned behavior. As learned behavior they can be changed through transformational learning. They can also be called habits. Like any habits the rule of thumb is it takes three times to create a good habit and one time to break it. Conversely it takes one time to create a bad habit and a lot of work to change it, ask anyone who’s ever tried to quit smoking. A typical characteristic of bad attitudes is spending time and energy finding fault, in this case with the school, assignment, instructors, your power structure or whatever. The purpose of this time and effort is to avoid taking responsibility for the result and it must be avoided. Other typical attitude issues revolve around particular subjects. For example someone might say, “I am no good at math.†This is a bad attitude towards a subject and can cause self-imposed learning blocks that set you up to fail. Finally unfamiliarity with goal setting and scheduling can cause attitude issues considering that school is time intensive and you are not provided a set mandatory and regulated schedule like work or grade school. Lack of aptitude in these areas, caused by lack of practice, will result in setting yourself up for failure. That failure results in the attitude of I didn’t have time and so on. While life does happen it should not be interfering all the time. If it is there is some scheduling and goal setting issues you need to resolve.
This brings me to coordinating and setting up a study schedule with your power structure and sticking to it. That is all I am going to say about that.
Asking questions is important. I am not only talking about asking questions to me but of the assignments. Each of your assignments are designed to get you to address issues. Identifying those issues is critical to your ability to address them. This goes to researching effectively and efficiently. It is important to ask the research material, be it an instructor, book or a web resource the right questions to gain the information for the identified issues that you need for the assignment.
These glimpses into my second session of class I believe address some common areas of self-doubt that adult students have. The upcoming tasks deal with learning how to properly conduct a self-assessment of their own learning style along with other aspects of their own situation and personality, goal setting and success strategies. Along with information that is not contained in the previous excerpt’s and training sessions surrounding the aforementioned topics I believe that a large majority of students get introduced to and are able to overcome their own self-doubt.
Just food for thought.
Randall Aungst, MBA
My favorite example as a jewish chef is developing love for gravlox and chicken liver pate in my gentile students who initially hate the very idea of both dishes. By sharing my culture I feel that I am expanding the "World View" that will eventually bring cultures who are exclusive together.
I recently had a student tell me that he had absolutely no thoughts about how to begin one of the assignments. He had not submitted it and when I reached out to him he said that he was able to jot down about three lines of information and nothing more. His reaction to this is an indication that he feels very insecure. Further, he has no sense of autonomy because he cannot change anything about the assignment. I did provide him with some guidance as to how to approach the assignment. He responded that he would try but was still unsure. I then advised him to take the assignment, one task at a time in order to let him focus on an activity and gain some confidence in working on it. He has not yet submitted his work so I'll see if this approach will help to motivate him or not.
I remind my students that mistakes and failures , are actually very important aspects of learning and to use them as bridges to their goals and success not walls around their goals and success
Self-doubt becomes very evident when teaching math to adult students, particularly those that have not been in school for some time.
I attempt to lesson that self-doubt by openly discussing the students hobbies and what encompasses their day to day activities while slowly steering the conversation into math....such as amount spent on groceries at one store compared to another, and cost savings, turned into percentages, and slowly they have the 'ah-hah' momnet of they really do use math in day to day activities
I teach drawing, and I always find students are doubting they can draw before they start my course. It is very rewarding at the mid-term critique when a student, who walked in to my class believing he could not draw, sees he can draw and his drawings are really great.
