Collective Efficacy and Education

People motivate and guide their actions partly based on their beliefs and personal efficacy (Bandura, 1997). Individuals are producers of experiences and shapers of events based on the perspective of human agency. It is convincing that the form of collective cooperation emerges from the need to achieve a certain goals which could not been achieved on one’s own. The interdependency of human functioning places a premium on the exercise of collective agency, where shared beliefs in the power to produce effects by collective action. Collective efficacy refers to a group shared belief in its conjoint capabilities to attain their goals and accomplish desired tasks. It involves the belief or perception that an effective collective action is possible to address a problem.

Individual’s deep processing and in-depth thinking needs an independent space. As we learn knowledge, internalize information and construct schema by ourselves rather than depending on being taught by someone. The research direction of teaching and learning such as whether implicit or explicit instruction might be deviated since the regulation and development of human epistemology have changed subtly along the time, as it evolves naturally unless we could edit our DNA. Ancestor human being traveled millions of years and become us so far, which forms our brain today.

Another issue is that the collective efficacy experiences a process of making a concordant agreement in a form of group discussion. Conformity appears due to vagaries of social persuasion such as commanding power of pressure (Bandura, 2000). A forced consensus disguises the variability in efficacy beliefs among multiple factions within a system. Therefore, the value of constructing collective efficacy in collective teaching needs to be clarified and justified. Come back to actual life, what I am curious about is the collective efficacy that each participant holds in a seminar context. The value of the field I am learning in the past half year has puzzled me for a long time, thus I hope to explore various beliefs of people attending the course. Since with a bigger scope of what we learn could help us get a clear mind of what we are doing and where we are going.