Building Self-Efficacy: How to Feel Confident in Your Online Teaching | Philosophy of Teaching - Faculty Focus

Jill Lassiter, EdD, associate professor in the department of health and human sciences and the director of the Wade Institute for Teaching and Learning at Bridgewater College observes, Now that we are into the realities of teaching in a COVID-world, I keep hearing similar sentiments from my colleagues, something to the effect of, “It’s going fine, but I don’t feel like a good teacher anymore.”  

Building Self-Efficacy: How to Feel Confident in Your Online Teaching
Photo: Faculty Focus

What I hear in these statements is not a bad teacher but one who has lost confidence in their teaching.  Whether teaching fully online, a hybrid model, or in-person with social distancing requirements, everyone has had to make changes to the way they teach.  The pedagogical style and practices that we previously relied on are either no longer an option or are not as effective given the current constraints.  So, we have adapted, learned the technology, and made necessary adjustments.  We’re doing it, but we don’t feel like we’re doing it well.  We’ve lost our confidence, and thus feel like we’re not good teachers anymore.  The good news is that we don’t have to wait for teaching to return to “normal” to feel like good teachers again.  We can start to feel confident again by building self-efficacy in our own online or hybrid teaching. 

Self-efficacy refers to one’s confidence in their ability to perform a task (Bandura, 1977).  Self-efficacy is situation specific, so while we may have high self-efficacy when it comes to traditional pedagogical methods, we can have equally low self-efficacy for online or hybrid teaching.  Our individual assessment of our competence to teach, and our confidence to overcome the barriers to doing so, represents our self-efficacy for new teaching styles.  While faculty have all shown that they can teach online or hybrid, we don’t necessarily feel confident that we’re doing it well. 

Bandura’s self-efficacy theory suggests there are four major sources for building confidence to perform and persevere at a task: mastery experience, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and emotional arousal.  Based on these sources of self-efficacy, there are a few practical strategies that faculty can use to build confidence and competence for online or hybrid teaching...

Final thoughts

Although I am not a gymnast, I once did a cartwheel in front of my class.  I was trying to teach the concept of self-efficacy and thought this would be an effective method for illustrating the concept.  I’m not sure what made me brave enough to do it, but I do know I was taking a risk of, quite literally, falling on my face.  Now, a decade later, it feels like we’re doing mental gymnastics in class every day as we struggle to adapt to new teaching environments and pedagogical constraints.  Every day feels like a risk as we try new technological modalities and instructional styles.  And just as much as I lacked confidence in my ability to do a cartwheel, many faculty lack confidence in their ability to teach effectively in an online or hybrid environment.  Yet, we are all taking the risk, and most days we don’t fall on our faces, but we also don’t feel very graceful.  Despite our self-doubt and stumbles, we can learn to thrive in this new teaching environment and use the self-efficacy theory to offer practical guidance to help us get there. 

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Source: Faculty Focus