EDD meeting on 10th December 2008

EDDG meeting – Confidence and Well-being 10/12/08


There was a very interesting and lively debate around the issues raised at the FERRN Seminar in Glasgow last week. I’ve highlighted some of the areas that may be worth investigating further, either through further workshops and learning and teaching days, or small scale research within the college.

FERRN Winter seminar

The confident and resilient learner
Work of Carol Craig and Emily Cutts:


Lack of evidence that a focus on boosting self-esteem is meaningful. Research in USA shows practice by teachers and parents to raise self-esteem in young people has encouraged too much self-absorption and contributed an increase in depression.

Teachers tend to : praise individuals too much (inappropriate) , restrict competition, giving everyone praise and recognition, don’t give negative feedback, give grades that are aspirational, restricting opportunities to fail. This can result in students who become over focussed on themselves.

High self-esteem can be a problem !

A focus on confidence , resilience (psychological immune system) and mind-sets is more appropriate and ‘successful’. Important to use negative experiences. Bad feelings have a purpose – galvanise us to do things differently.

Research in Glasgow and Napier– mindsets (fixed and growth)

Small interventions (4 ten minute sessions on mindsets, and altering feedback sheets) can improve academic performance and possibly retention. This is something we could develop and introduce.

Links to goal setting, motivation, giving feedback, tutorial work , induction, personal planning .

Further information on confidence, well-being and mind-sets is available from www.centreforconfidence.co.uk

Handout research : Emma Clays and Kyle Smith (Perth college)

This research examined the outcomes of using formatted and unformatted texts with students studying Higher English. The students who had been given unformatted text did better in tests. This related to content and structure, with students writing in sentences and paragraphs rather than bullet points.

If you would like to find out more about this research and possibly be involved in a small-scale research with your own students then email or phone me.


Karen Lawson

Confidence and well-being

I thought I'd get an entry going on the "Confidence and Well-being" session. I couldn't make it, so I'm interested to know some more about this. Maybe we could use this space to exchange our thoughts on it.

I feel that when I explain to people who don't work in FE what I do (when I say I teach English or Communication they often have some fantastical idea of me holding court around a small group of bookish, eager and able students) that I use the phrase "confidence-building" a lot. And yes, when I think about it, I spend a lot of time encouraging and supporting students who often have low self-esteem. Of course, my degree or, to be honest, my PGCE, didn't provide me with any in-depth training in this. Like a lot of what we do in FE, it seems to be something what we pick up along the way.

So, yes, confidence and well-being are, without doubt, important (would we argue otherwise?). What I'd like to know more about is how, on a very practical level, we can work on these skills with students in a more structured, conscious and, of course, meaningful way.

What would a confidence and well-being programme of study look like? Would there even be a programme of study? What kind of activities would it involve? Would it be integrated across all points of delivery (this seems, at a gut level, to make sense)? Or would it be a stand-alone programme? What CPD do we need to take this forward if we want to?

These questions may all have been dealt with at the meeting, but the blog might be a good place to archive folk's ideas by replying to my entry by clicking on "comment" below.

Here's the link that Karen provided: http://www.centreforconfidence.co.uk/projects.php?p=cGlkPTM4