We spent a lot of the early parts of this course talking about reinforcement and its relationship to self-efficacy and how the key behind good reinforcement is knowing the individual and understanding what is rewarding to them, information that is nearly impossible for a teacher to have. This seems almost completely impossible if we are thinking about small groups of students working together towards a shared goal and especially for entire classrooms, as students are motivated by different things, sometimes contradictory things.
Even leaving behind the idea of reinforcement, I'm having a hard time picturing how a teacher could could raise the collective efficacy of all of their students (at least close to) simultaneously. It seems the teacher would have to start with the least efficacious student and work to increase their efficacy, but I feel as if this would risk the most efficacious students become disinterested because the "lowered bar" used to increase the lowest students efficacy would not allow them to meet the efficacy needs. To sum it up, I'm just wandering how useful of a construct is collective efficacy for classroom teachers?
No comments:
Post a Comment