This is unrelated to my post today but I think it is so poignant! It is the UN Security General talking about the little girl the Taliban tried to murder, Malala Yousafzai.
If you haven't read Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn you truly should.
I really liked how Beers questions teachers at her
conferences when they don’t want to speak in front of their peers. The teachers
acknowledge that it is difficult to share your ideas in front of people you
don’t know out of fear that you might be wrong. Beers points out that if adults
with expertise in their subjects have problems sharing ideas how can we expect students
not to share these same feelings?
Lack of a confidence affects people of all ages. I had many
students in kindergarten last year that lacked confidence in themselves. It was
really disheartening to see it in a five year old and it is just as tough to
see it in a teenager. Teenagers care a lot about what their friends think of
them. They don’t want to be made fun of or seem dumb in front of their peers.
For me, the most amazing part of this week’s reading was
when the students in the “regular” class read the books the advance class read
and were able to keep up and excel. I thought that was such a great story and
I’m glad the teacher gave them a chance to prove they can handle the workload
of the advanced class. They did just as well as the students in the advanced
class! If you have high expectations for your students and, most importantly, you
help them along the way they can accomplish great things. This teacher went above and beyond to help
these students by scaffolding these difficult texts and helping them
individually with the parts of reading that challenged them the most.
When you have confidence in your students they can start to
have more confidence in themselves. This reminds me of the expectancy theory we
learned about in our beloved Psychology of Learning class. When a student
expects to do well they achieve higher. They work harder because they expect to
succeed. The student focuses more on the task at hand and less about what
others think or the possibility of failing. It can be really difficult to
instill confidence in a student. Merely saying “You can do it; you’re great”
simply isn’t enough. You have to be realistic about your expectations for your
students. Reading Proust in a class full of reluctant readers probably won’t
instill confidence in them. They could feel defeated before they even begin. On
the other hand however as Dr. Beers says “you’re fooling yourself if you think
middle school and high school students don’t know when we’ve dumbed down the
curriculum” (Beers, 261). If the
students think that their teacher believes they can’t do something difficult
they’ll start to believe it’s true. This sets them up for failure from the
beginning.
I love how she mentions learning your students’ names. It is
so vital to learn all of your students! If you repeatedly tell them you have
confidence in them but you don’t even know their names you come off, and
probably are, being insincere. When I finally learned (most) of my 300 students
I saw once a week my relationship with a lot of them grew tremendously. (I’m Skyping
with one of them later this week–I’m so excited!!) They start to trust you and
realize you really care about them with the little effort it takes just to
learn their names.
A huge component of confidence is trust. You have to trust
those around you to encourage rather than belittle you. Although I feel like
the idea of the Ding a ling would be hard to really commit to in a classroom, I
really appreciated that it helped the students realize how destructive their
snide comments and “joking” can be towards one another. Hearing a concrete
signal when a snide remark or a condescending statement was made reminded students
how often they are cruel to one another. If students trust that your class is a
safe space where they can say what they think without being made fun of they
will be more willing to participate. This engagement will lead to success in your
class and hopefully become the norm for your students rather than an anomaly.
Lastly, here's a great article about the rising Latino population in Texas and how in 2010 40% of Latinos in Texas under the age of 25 never finished high school. This is what we're up against people! Let's do our part to fix this inequality.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/as-hispanic-population-grows-the-education-gap-may-grow-too.html?_r=0
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