I Blame Dr. Albert Bandura

This week, I’ve switched up my classes at Island Circus Space. I’ve found the classes I was taking weren’t helping me to learn or improve new skills, and similarly were not allowing me time to polish skills I already have, or that I am using for my routine. Dr. Lucinda Brown would be so pleased, because it all had to do with…

Self-Efficacy!

The idea of self-efficacy being important in teaching and learning has been on my radar for some time. As a tutor for UVic’s Learning Assistance Program, self-efficacy training (including the four components of teaching for increased self-efficacy) was part of how we learned to help our students take charge of their own learning. I’ve been hearing about the importance of self-efficacy again in Psychology of Classroom Learning (ED-D 401), and it’s made me realize how little of it I’ve been getting from my hoop and trapeze classes.

Image: Reciprocal Determinism by EDCU320RHT on Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 4.0).

I started at this studio taking intermediate hoop/trapeze, considering that I had a year of experience in the hoop. It turns out that I’m halfway between their version of ‘beginner’ and ‘intermediate’, and being in a class full of folks that are much more experienced, and only practicing skills that are new to me, has been really impacting my self-confidence with this discipline. I know as a teacher that this is not how I can learn optimally, so I’ve decided to switch up my schedule to take the beginner-level hoop/trapeze class, as well as an extra strength-training class to get me up to speed with the intermediate class. This is a different angle that might yield the same results, but in a way that I can feel much more comfortable with my progress.

I’ve really begun to reflect on how teaching a skill like aerial arts is intrinsically the same as teaching science or English or anything else in a classroom. Once I start thinking about it, the principles of pedagogy start turning up everywhere!

(Featured image: Psychologist Albert Bandura in 2005 from  Fridolin freudenfett on Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 4.0.)