It’s likely not the task that stops most students. It’s the voice in their head whispering, “I can’t do this.” And that voice left unchecked can drown out even our best lessons, most careful scaffolds, and most passionate teaching. Building self-efficacy is a key element in turning that inner voice in a more positive direction.
Albert Bandura described self-efficacy as “judgments of how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations.’ In plain English, it’s a student’s belief that they can handle the challenge at hand. It isn’t the same as blind confidence or that “you can do anything” cheerleading. It’s domain-specific. A student might feel like a rock star in reading but freeze when it’s time for math. That distinction is crucial, especially for instructional planning. And it’s why the same child who aces an oral presentation in class might underperform during state testing. It’s not ability but belief about their ability that changes.
The Four Pillars of Self-Efficacy
Bandura outlined four primary ways students build (or erode) their sense of self-efficacy. Let me break them down with some classroom connections:
1. Performance Accomplishments (a.k.a. Mastery Experiences)
The strongest way to boost self-efficacy is through real success. This means giving students tasks they can actually complete without making them so easy they feel meaningless.
For example, you could start your first writing unit with a low-floor, high-ceiling writing task. Each student could share a one-paragraph story about a personal experience. Most students could find a win, whether it was voice, detail, or structure.
2. Vicarious Experience
Seeing a peer succeed can be just as powerful as doing it yourself. When a struggling writer watches another student from the same table group read their improved draft aloud, that voice in their head goes from “I can’t” to “Maybe I could.” To encourage this potential, use peer models during a shared close-read. Display a student’s annotated response to a fiction passage and walk the class through how they found text evidence. Suddenly, success isn’t just possible, it’s visible.
3. Verbal Persuasion
Words are powerful, but only if they’re grounded in something real. “You’ve got this” doesn’t do much unless it’s backed by evidence. Instead, try, “You structured your opinion clearly in that second paragraph. Let’s keep that going in your conclusion.” The praise here is credible, specific, and tied to academic expectations.
4. Physiological and Emotional States
Nerves are real and they mess with performance. Bandura pointed out that anxiety can be worse than the actual task. We’ve all seen this before: a student who writes strong arguments in class crumbles during the writing portion of a high-stakes assessment. What may help is using short bursts of timed writing in a low-stakes setting. It wasn’t about the grade. It was about making the environment feel familiar.Over time, the anxiety will fade and confidence grows.
Why It All Matters
Students with high self-efficacy choose to engage, persist when it gets hard, and bounce back from mistakes. Students with low self-efficacy give up early and start protecting their ego instead of learning. Although growth mindset, as we discussed last week, is a legitimate psychological phenomenon, mindset interventions that are designed to support a growth mindset have mixed results. For now, try the examples form the four pillars of self-efficacy which all include challenge and support.
Practical Moves You Can Make Tomorrow
Here are three moves to infuse self-efficacy building into your instruction starting tomorrow:
- Design Early Wins
Whether you’re teaching fractions or theme, start with an accessible task that aligns to your grade’s standard. If you’re teaching 3rd grade students to determine the central message of a story (RL.3.2), start with a clear, relatable story and scaffold the process. Once students feel what success looks like, they’re more likely to stick with harder tasks. - Model, Fade, Release
Use gradual release. In writing, this could look like modeling a strong introduction together (W.5.2), then co-constructing a body paragraph with students, and finally releasing them to draft a conclusion independently. - Build Feedback into the Flow
Don’t wait until the end. Use live feedback during small group or independent work. For example, during a speaking task (SL.4.4), stop and highlight effective use of evidence on the spot. That real-time reinforcement builds both skill and belief.
The Challenge
If we want kids to believe they can learn, we have to create learning experiences that prove it to them. Pick one student this week who’s struggling and track how you help them experience a performance accomplishment. Maybe it’s a math problem, a fluency check, or a written response. Watch how that one small success starts rewriting the story they tell themselves.
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
For more information on this concept, read How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice (https://a.co/d/a0tZSMR) This post is a summary of individual chapters from How Learning Happens.
School Intellect 