Negotiating Self-Efficacy During a Pandemic Through Pragmatic Teacher Hope

Introduction

Many preservice teachers decide on becoming an educator because of experiences they had as students. School is often a place where they found success and support. In their lens, the idea of being a teacher is built from the idea teachers teach and guide students through learning with ease but the reality of how challenging the various components of teaching students in PreK-12 grades becomes apparent as the students move through education courses, especially those with field experiences. There is a line where efficacy, the ability to perform a task is gauged by a supervisor, a mentor teacher, an instructor, or even a peer, is merged with reflective practice. The reflective practice of teaching often leads to an educator's sense of believing she or he can perform a task. One important element of developing as an educator in teacher preparation, the first few years of teaching, and through a career is the ability for self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy of teachers was introduced as having a connection to student success by Armor et al. (1976). Building off the concept, Bandura (1994) expanded the meaning of self-efficacy to explain the behavior of individuals in various settings describing:

In the context of education, he explained teachers as:

As part of teacher preparation, pre-service teachers are introduced to the concept of self-efficacy as part of their teacher identity. The sense of teacher identity is founded during the years of preparation and continues as they have greater independence and decision-making as a full-time classroom teacher.

This chapter tells the narrative of a young educator who ended her teacher preparation during the COVID 19 pandemic and taught her first year online. The nuance is that she did so in Baltimore City schools. The typical trauma her students already had was amplified by the restraints of the pandemic and online learning format. The fallout of that year continues to plague the orientation of a curriculum and pedagogy that was designed to uplift and empower those students. Her trials and tribulations provide a narrative of enthusiasm, frustration, exhaustion, and hope as her own self-efficacy is tested and realigned. The conceptual lens guiding the chapter is provided by a teacher educator who built a strong relationship with the new teacher over many years. He began guiding and mentoring her during her sophomore year in a PreK-4 teacher education program. The relationship and perspectives of the two authors are woven throughout the chapter to shed light on how self-efficacy manifests itself through the experiences of a new teacher. What is noteworthy is this teacher’s experience around self-efficacy has occurred throughout the COVID 19 pandemic and the challenge it has presented to prek-12 education systems and teacher education programs. Transformation of self-efficacy is often not designed but occurs through resiliency; this is that story for one new teacher.

Background

Situating self-efficacy in education is important. As Heslin and Klehe (2006) describe “A high degree of self-efficacy leads people to work hard and persist in the face of setbacks, as illustrated by many great innovators and politicians who were undeterred by repeated obstacles, ridicule, and minimal encouragement” (p. 705). Continuing, they explain that the three sources of self-efficacy are enactive self-mastery, role-modeling, and verbal persuasion (Heslin & Klehe, 2006). Enactive self-mastery is the progressive mastery of a task by breaking it down into smaller tasks. Role-modeling “occurs when people observe others perform a task that they are attempting to learn or visualize themselves performing successfully” (p. 706). Verbal persuasion is when another expert provides positive feedback to individuals for their work or one adds their own positive self-talk. All three of these might occur or be experienced negatively as part of student teaching and then as an employed teacher. There is less time for role-modeling or verbal persuasion after student teaching and so teachers utilize these three sources of self-efficacy to build up their sense of effectiveness.