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As an exam tutor, building your child’s confidence is probably the most important part of my job.
Because we know from our own experiences that we need to believe in a positive outcome to take a chance on doing something scary. When we feel confident we’re more likely to take action towards our goals.
So it makes a massive difference to your child’s wellbeing to have more confidence in themselves.
According to this article from Psychology Today, confidence is something that we can grow. It certainly isn’t fixed, so even the most self-critical students can turn this around.
So where does your child’s confidence come from?
The only way we are able to have more confidence in what we can do is by doing things before we are ready. This means taking small steps just outside of your comfort zone.
This needs to be a measured approach. If we go too far out of the comfort zone into completely unfamiliar territory with no support, that leads to overwhelm. The brain and body protects itself in this scenario by shutting down executive functions and turning on ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ functions. That is not what we want for academic performance, as the executive functions are exactly what we need to use.
If we stay close in the comfort zone, with lots of help and safety, there is no learning. Growth never happens in this zone, because it is not needed. We don’t have any experiences to learn from. We don’t try things. It isn’t where we need to be when we are trying to improve in any way.
So it makes sense then that when working towards an academic goal, there needs to be a consistent and manageable amount of stretch. There needs to be room to make mistakes, but no penalty for doing so. We just pick up and carry on with our new experience.
How can we build confidence into learning?
Often anxious students are afraid of getting things wrong, and then afraid that other people will judge them for it. It isn’t so bad to make mistakes when no one knows, although that can still result in a lot of negative self talk. But if other people notice our ‘failures’ it can feel embarrassing.
Because that is a large part of human nature, most of us behave that way most of the time. So we are seeing ourselves make mistakes a lot more frequently than we see others making mistakes.
Understandably this can lead to the belief that we are not as good at learning as others are.
For most of the time I’ve been tutoring I’ve supported anxious students in one to one lessons, and confident students in groups. In recent years I’ve realised that this is the wrong way around.
I made a mistake.
What did I learn?
When I bring anxious students together in a group, they gain so much more confidence.
When they’re working with me alone it is expected that I will be the subject expert. They will be always in second place. It is my job, and the fact that I do this stuff daily means it would be pretty surprising if I were not good at it. But that isn’t always the logic an anxious, self critical brain sees. It sees that someone else is doing better and therefore thinks that they are not doing well. They don’t see what I see – that they are making progress every day towards their goals.
When they learn in a small group, I still have the room to lay out their individual learning journey step by step. But there is no longer the “expert – student” dynamic. They are learning among their peers, and they each get the opportunity to be the expert with each other.
Of course, I also encourage this, and over time they all build confidence and enjoy their learning so much more. I wrote about this in my blog from a couple of years ago.
Going forward, I’d love to see all of my students work in this way for the massive benefit it gives them. So I’m setting up more and more small groups between myself and the award nominated tutor team at Green Tutors.
If you would like to see what classes are available head to https://greentutors.co.uk/group-classes/.
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