“Well, what are the most important things to achieve in the strategic plan this year?”
This question was posed recently at a school council committee discussion on strategic plan accountabilities. While I was initially challenged to say everything in the document was important I got to think a little deeper on this whilst planning the finer details of staff meetings for the year.
To say that the meeting agendas for the year were over flowing would be to understate the situation. We have booked one facilitator, Muffy Hand, for 8 workshops at staff meetings this year on building teacher efficacy.
Wow – that’s a lot I heard myself internally muttering. “Is that really so important?” What about more teacher workshops on maths education [one of our core improvement targets] – more internal talk.
I also heard self talk on professional learning needing to occur outside meetings – in coaching and mentoring situations – true I said to myself – but who are the coaches? External experts, and we have had a few experts coaching teachers over the past few years did have an immediate impact but long term did we create a culture of dependency?
So is this efficacy so important and what exactly is it?
According to Bobbett, Olivier, and Ellett (2008) teachers’ efficacy beliefs and teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs are distinctly different constructs. Specifically, teacher efficacy or teachers’ sense of efficacy refers to “teachers’ beliefs in their abilities to affect student performance” (Dellinger et al., 2008, p. 753) whereas teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs refer to “teachers’ beliefs in their capabilities to perform specific teaching tasks at a specified level of quality in a specified situation”.
So what are we dealing with here when we talk building efficacy in our strategic plan – my self talk tells me its teacher self- efficacy – building teacher beliefs about specific tasks at specific levels of quality i.e. teaching maths in certain ways to a level of quality.
So how does one build this?
Muffy Hand suggests that the best way to achieve improved self efficacy is for teachers to work in effective teams. Muffy spent the first staff meeting session setting the context about how teachers needs including self efficacy might be met by working in effective teams.
Session two was how to go about setting up effective teams – defining purpose and protocols for working . She said some things that stood out for me:
- Effective teams have shared accountability – “it’s not OK that people don’t share”
- Effective teams have standards of excellence – “it’s not OK to be ordinary”
So I think I get this now we must deliberately build teacher efficacy at the same time as building teacher instructional skills and deeper understandings of the disciplines we teach. They are not separate but intertwined. They are both important
