The Importance of Confidence in Teaching

I’ve written before that I believe four things define a teacher:

  1. subject knowledge
  2. pedagogical skill
  3. motivation
  4. confidence

I think too often schools over-focus on one of those areas to the detriment of the others. It may be that a school works on team building to develop the motivation of its staff, but neglects to look at the pedagogical skills that are needed to teach good lessons. I’m sure you can think of your own examples where schools work too hard on one of those qualities while the other three are going down the pan.

As individuals we all have our different strengths and for me my subject knowledge has been strong whereas my pedagogical skills have been developed thanks to the grace, patience and expertise of a whole host of teachers I have worked with over the years. I’ve never really considered that a lack of motivation or indeed confidence would affect me, although I have seen how it has affected others over the years.

But as I reflect on the reasons for my necessary ending at my previous job, I realise that I had lost some confidence. As I began to receive both public and private criticism of my practice I found that I worked harder to fix the problems which had been identified. But the criticisms didn’t go away, my confidence did instead.

One example is a lesson observation that I knew was coming up on a Monday morning. I’ve been observed many times, but never under such criticism and I found that I worried about the lesson all weekend: planning and re-planning what I would do, unable to focus on the things we were doing as a family and losing sleep.

When the two observers came into the room on Monday, I found that any confidence in my ability to do a good lesson just drained away. Some elements of the lesson went well, some didn’t and the external criticism increased. As my confidence decreased I found that in turn it affected my motivation. I was not looking forward to the school day and I was not enjoying the interactions with the children or my colleagues as much as I once had. Seeing the people who were observing me just in passing around school made me feel physically sick, so I did my best to avoid any interactions with them.

In short, whether or not the original criticisms were deserved, by this point my confidence was so low that I was actually under-performing. Something had to change – another realisation that led to my Necessary Ending that I have written about so much recently.

Over the summer break I learned some things about regaining confidence. Now at a new job with my confidence firmly back in place and feeling motivated to get up and teach every day it’s time to write about some ways I’ve found handy to increase confidence. But they’ll have to wait for another day.

2 thoughts on “The Importance of Confidence in Teaching”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Social Slider