Increased confidence and self-esteem does not just occur by having someone say that you are wonderful, rather it occurs through real success and achievement. How can we help students be successful?
5 Steps for Building Confidence
- Systematically and explicitly teach new concepts. Break skills into small components so students master many elements on their way to successfully learning a new skill.
- Use multiple strategies so students build multiple storage areas and have multiple pathways for withdrawing the information when required (e.g., use pictures and stories, use more than one sense, link new information to existing knowledge, use the information in different contexts).
- Provide the level of scaffolding the student needs to successfully complete the task and gradually remove the scaffolding as the student becomes more competent.
- Give the student lots and lots of opportunities to practise, practise, practise. The weaker a student’s working memory, the more practice required for the information to be stored in long-term memory.
- Ask the student to retrieve the information multiple times, gradually increasing the time between each retrieval. Make sure this is done in a ‘low-stake’ environment and corrective feedback is provided if the student makes an error.