A snowmobiling (or self-efficacy?) disaster

The night before I went snowmobiling for the first time, I tried not to think about it. It was just about as easy as when someone might tell you, "whatever you do, don't think about the word 'elephant." I tried not to think about last summer when I crashed my bike, tried not to think about getting stuck and rescued from a mountain while snowboarding, tried not to think about the times my sister left me in the dust in a bike race.

However I may have tried, my mind raced around the idea of getting on (and hopefully off) a snowmobile successfully. I was great a faking my confidence! And though I asserted my hopes of high performance to my sporty sister, my prayers of survival were not far beneath the surface.

Before I had time to ask "how do I stop?" my sister and the guide were off! The shaking and rattling beneath me, mirrored my feelings on the inside. I'll never forget the feeling that the machine under me was totally out of control from the second we raced into the forest.

Sure enough, when taking a turn (or trying too), I cruised straight into a tree. Actually the tree cruised right into me, as I remember it, leaving a piece of branch as evidence of my catastrophic attempt at sports. During the crash, I specifically remember thinking, "Well, this figures."

Reading about self-efficacy in Motivation for Achievement, the words resonate well as I think back on my snowmobiling mishap. "Physical symptoms such as sweating or rapid heart rate may provide clues about efficacy," Alderman (2004, p. 73) writes. Yep, that happened. "Too much anxiety in approaching a task may lead to either avoiding the presentation or negative thinking about your possible performance." Why, that happened too. "Anxiety can interfere with perceptions of self-efficacy; this, in turn, interferes with performance." Yes, certainly there was "interference" with my snowmobiling career getting off the ground.

When I think about my experience, I ask myself how many times do children feel as I felt on a snowmobile when in school: out of control and destined to crash. Just as my low self-efficacy may have contributed to the branch through my face, the self-efficacy of students likely does the same. And what, as their teacher, can I do about this?

I see myself as a "bad" sports player, so I usually don't play. Fortunately, this doesn't handicap me much in terms of my perception of leading a "successful" life. But take for instance the student who feels weak in the knees and has performance anxiety to read. Reading, unlike snowmobiling, can and will make or break "success," however you look at it.

The difference in my experience in reading to that of sports was the atmosphere of competitiveness and certainty that I was not aloud to fail or else I'd be letting someone down. I needed the safety of making mistakes in order to improve as a foundation for building self-efficacy.

In the classroom, I find the #1 priority to positively affect motivation, is the safety and culture of the classroom community. In doing so, self-worth of all students can be protected. As this as my foundation, the following are my basis for setting up a classroom in which motivation is positively affected:
-Establish norms for social support and peer respect
-Model and demonstrate help-seeking and question asking
-Avoid labels and grouping of students so they implicitly feel labeled or tracked at all costs
-Choose peer models carefully, so that they may demonstrate working out difficulties
-Practice acting as a coping model so students may see how to navigate an unfamiliar topic
-Avoid competition with others; encourage competition with self

If I am able to set up these 6 foundations for my practice, I believe students will not crash (as I did) but will slowly acquiesce to believe that they CAN learn and CAN achieve.