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The Effort and Efficacy beliefs form the third layer of the Five Key Beliefs of student motivation, which I unpack at length in The Will to Learn: How to Cultivate Student Motivation without Losing Your Own and in Chapter Two of These 6 Things: How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most.
What are the Effort and Efficacy beliefs?
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The key ideas about the Effort and Efficacy beliefs
Key Idea #1: .
Teachers are like cell phone to my students, and as they receive these signals they come to (often unconscious) conclusions about my degree of Credibility.
Key Idea #2: .
While there are many formulations of how Credibility is developed in the heart of a student, my summary of these is simple: CCP.
What, then, should we do?
How can I cultivate the Effort and Efficacy beliefs in my classroom?
At the end of this section, you'll see a list of articles I've written over the years sharing many ways that you can cultivate the Effort and Efficacy beliefs in your students. But when I wrote The Will to Learn, I was determined to identify the fewest, biggest-bang-for-your-buck strategies as I could. I narrowed and narrowed and narrowed, until finally I had arrived at three core strategies for cultivating Effort and Efficacy.
- Strategy 7: Woodenize All of It. In this strategy, we seek to effectively teach, model, and reinforce every learning-conducive behavior that we expect of our students. The strategy is named after legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who famously because each basketball season by teaching his players how to put on their socks and shoes. This strategy is all about making effective effort clear for all of our students.
- For a detailed treatment of this strategy, see pp. 175-193 in The Will to Learn or this DSJR One Stop Shop.
- Strategy 8: Define Success Wisely, Early, and Often. Most students do not have a clear or helpful idea of what success in school looks like. In this strategy, we seek to communicate our vision of success to students and to help our students generate and reflect upon their own definitions of success.
- For a detailed treatment of this strategy, see pp. 194-205 in The Will to Learn or this DSJR One Stop Shop.
- Strategy 9: Unpack Outcomes, Good or Bad. This strategy is all about pointing our students' attention toward wisely interpreting how their learning is going. If we don't do this, students are likely to make maladaptive interpretations of both bad results (e.g., “I did bad on the test; I'm stupid”) and good results (e.g., “I did good on the test; I'm smart”).
- For a detailed treatment of this strategy, see pp. 206-218 in The Will to Learn or this DSJR One Stop Shop.
Extra “booster” strategies for the Effort and Efficacy beliefs
Outside of the core strategies outlined above, here is a list I'll keep updating of brief articles I've written to describe more Effort and Efficacy boosters.
- Eight Lessons for Enhancing the Effort and Efficacy Beliefs
- The Effort Belief in Action: Read Naturally as a Case Study
- End of Year Efficacy Booster: Unpacking Outcomes via Conversation Challenge
- Efficacy and the Brain 101 – David Reese Guest Post
- Booker T. Washington on the Efficacy Belief
Common questions and hangups about the Effort and Efficacy beliefs
What are the most common ways teachers unintentionally undermine their own Credibility?
Still got questions?
If you ask a question in the comments section below, I'll answer it and incorporate your question into the article you just read. In other words, you'll get a double whammy: you get your question answered, and you help make this article better for future readers.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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