Making Teaching Relevant: Enhancing Students’ Self-Efficacy Through Teachers’ Enthusiasm for More Active Classroom Engagement

Abstract

A strong sense of self-efficacy supports human accomplishment. Learners with high assurance in their capacities could approach difficult tasks as challenges to be handled rather than threats to be avoided. Such an outlook fosters those learners’ activities’ engrossment and their intrinsic interests of the learned contents. Therefore, learners set themselves goals and keep a strong commitment to these designated goals. To face failure, learners heighten and sustain their efforts by attributing this failure to insufficient effort and deficient knowledge and skills which ought to be acquired. To this end, those learners utilize their prior knowledge assurance to overcome the confronted threats.

Concurrently, teachers ought to provide the relevant instruction that empowers their students. Consequently, learners could raise their expectations of the relevance of the perceived cognition and make sense of their world. Make learning relevance deemed a catalyst towards learners’ self- efficacy, motivation, and engagement with the learning processes. This article examines the irrevocable relationship between learners’ self- efficacy and their learning relevance towards mastery learning and active classroom engagement. The article raises some teaching challenges and suggests some research-based strategies to help teachers appreciate the broad panorama of learning and teaching in classrooms characterized by teaching self-efficacy and enthusiasm.