Boost learners’ confidence
Margarita Steinberg
Helping students with their confidence around learning, and helping them to learn about learning go hand-in-hand. Learners don’t automatically recognise their successes, and helping them notice and celebrate every bit of progress can help them keep going (Kolb, 1984).
This chapter is developed from the online workshop on supporting learners’ confidence which I delivered at the ALN Festival of Learning in April 2021. The session showcased, and let participants experience, some useful approaches to tackling topics around confidence with groups of learners in an online format. For a review of confidence-building methods, see Maclellan (2013).
What is the idea?
‘Challenges and Triumphs’ Timeline is an activity often used in coaching. It provides a format for highlighting both successes and challenges a learner experiences over the lifespan of an endeavour or a project. Referring to participants’ own personal experiences is highly persuasive in highlighting to them the successes they’re already achieved (but may not have recognised or acknowledged). This then equips them with a convincing reason to feel confident about their future successes in tackling current and anticipated difficulties. This chapter suggests ways of adapting the ‘Timeline’ activity for use in educational settings.
The Timeline activity can also act as a diagnostic, where students identify upcoming challenges they’re concerned about or feel ill-prepared for. The tutor can then choose to address common concerns in a group setting, or support students individually as appropriate.
The activity is organised as follows:
1. Introduction
Participants are introduced to the format of a timeline and the context (the project, the time-span etc.).
2. Production
Participants each work on their own Timeline initially, marking in ~3 significant challenges, and ~3 significant successes over the specified timespan.
This activity can also be used to map participants’ concerns about upcoming / future tasks, e.g. by using the instruction “Add in some challenges you anticipate”.
3. Reflection
Once participants have completed their individual timelines, they’re invited to reflect on their own and/or discuss with peers (can be done in a write/pair/share format). Reflecting on what strengths and strategies the learners had drawn on to overcome previous challenges can also help them deal with future challenges more effectively.
Why this idea?
Most universities not only want to produce skilled graduates in various fields but also help them learn how to learn so that they will be able to cope with future learning challenges of many kinds (Hoskins & Fredriksson, 2008). There are different ways to conceptualise “learning how to learn”. A useful one is to think in terms of improving learners’ self-regulated learning capability (Winne & Hadwin, 1998). The exercise described in this chapter is designed to help students better understand their learning by recalling pa