Viewpoint: Carol Craig
Autumn 2007
The challenge for schools lies in giving kids a sense of purpose.
Scotland’s new Curriculum for Excellence has thrown down the gauntlet for educationalists. For the first time, it sets out the purposes of education, and the creation of ‘confident individuals’ is now one of the four main aims of education. This aspirational agenda is not without its challenges, and the success of this task will largely come down to how it is tackled in the nation’s schools.
Scotland must be wary of following the American road of ‘self-esteem’. The first chapter of my new book, Creating Confidence – A Handbook For Professionals Working With Young People is dedicated to exploring the problems with the American example. In America, parents and teachers put too much emphasis on how young people feel – outlawing criticism and competition and indulging in frequent and unwarranted praise in an attempt to get children to feel good about themselves.
The problem with praise
Praise is often used as a shortcut to creating confidence, but it’s better to spend more time with a pupil and to pay more high quality attention. It’s the difference between looking at a child’s drawing and saying it’s excellent before walking away, and looking at a child’s drawing and encouraging them to tell you about it and work on it some more.
Professor Carol Dweck has done some excellent work in this area. She points out that praising a child for a fixed ability actually undermines their confidence as it leaves them worrying about whether they can keep it up. It’s better to offer praise for something they can influence, such as the amount of effort they put in. If a child completes a puzzle and you say 'you are very clever, would you like to do a more difficult puzzle?' they will say no. And so, praise becomes demotivating.
Another pitfall of this simplistic approach to developing confidence is that it produces children who have rarely had to handle failure or unpleasant emotions. This then undermines their resilience. It also undermines their learning. Well-judged, constructive criticism accelerates learning and prepares young people for the normal vicissitudes of life.
What is confidence?
Many people define confidence in children as social confidence or the ability to speak in public. To me, this is a narrow approach. Confidence is about self-efficacy. The kind of confidence we should try to foster in young people is the kind that is related to a specific outcome or activity, coupled with a sense of optimism. You can be confident about doing something like changing a tyre and that’s a different thing to social confidence, but that does not mean it’s not valuable.
In this sense I am talking from experience. My son Jamie was quiet at school, and as a result probably not considered confident. Yet at 18 years old he decided to travel around Latin America in a truck with a group of strangers. Needless to say we had our concerns with the plan, but Jamie told me: 'I’m perfectly confident that I can do this.' That’s a self-contained confidence that draws on inner resources, and it should not be underestimated.
Confidence is not all about you and how you feel, and neither is it about how often your voice is heard in public. Real confidence is focused and resilient. Even more importantly, it’s best directed away from you. It’s not about how people see you, but rather about serving a goal much bigger than you are, and having a sense of purpose. That concept fits in with the Scottish value system far better than American notions of self-esteem, and what’s more, I believe it’s what our young people want. That aspect of the quest for confidence overlaps with the ‘responsible citizens’ capacity of the Curriculum for Excellence and is a welcome emphasis.
Follow the leader
For ‘confident individuals’ to mean anything in practice, Scottish schools must think carefully about how they translate the new curriculum in the classroom. Confidence is a more complex issue than people realise, and we as a nation must refine our understanding of just what that term means. For teachers, that means remembering that they are dealing with individuals. They need to create the conditions which support children to develop belief in their own capacities, a sense of purpose and an optimistic outlook.
There is a big role for leaders here, whether that’s teachers as mentors in the classroom or school leaders inspiring their staff. The challenge is for educationalists to take a new approach. The role of education is to create opportunities. The word confidence need never be mentioned to a child. This is not about assessment, checklists or compulsion – it’s about thinking more and, most importantly, about inspiration.
More information
Carol Craig is the author of The Scots’ Crisis Of Confidence and Creating Confidence. She is the Chief Executive of the Centre for Confidence and Well-being, a small charity based in Glasgow. Hear more about Carol’s views on confidence by visiting LTS' new Learning about Learning website.- Posted on 21 September 2007 under cfe, health and wellbeing, issue 19, viewpoint.
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Peter Eavers, 5 December 2007, 3.46 pm
I found this an insightful and well considered piece, highlighting the link between confidence, responsible citizenship and the development of leadership. There are clearly strong parallels with Assessment is for Learning approaches, particularly in terms of asking children to talk about their work and focussing on how to make it even better. I also welcome the important link made between self-efficacy and developing resilience in our young people.