Nursery World - Positive Relationships: Confidence

There are three different levels of confidence, and practitioners
have an important role to play in helping these to flourish in children,
argue John Hattie and Gregory CR Yates in this edited extract from their
new book on the science of learning.

When it comes to human activity, confidence is a term we all use freely, and as teachers we often evaluate students on the level of confidence they exhibit. But aside from our own perception, we have almost no secure index of what it means to be confident.

The term is confusing in that we use the same word to refer to three levels of confidence: the (a) global level of self-esteem, (b) domain level of perceived competency, (c) task-related level, often called self-efficacy.

SELF-ESTEEM

Our global self-esteem involves beliefs about our own self-worth. But is it our professional role to develop our students' self-esteem? Such ideas represent theories widely popular from the 1960s through to the present day. The idea is that self-esteem is the central part of the personality, the important core that requires nurturance. If we can develop positive self-regard in our students, other positive outcomes such as motivation, social responsibility and achievement will follow.

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