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Establishing confidence in the classroom is a hard task for teachers to accomplish. While difficult, inspiring confidence in your students is crucial to being a successful teacher and establishing a healthy classroom atmosphere. Building a confident classroom atmosphere comes in three forms: setting attainable goals, expressing a positive attitude, and building on the student’s strengths. After using these tools, a teacher will have more confident students and increase their classroom engagement. The first way a teacher can build confidence in their students is to set attainable goals. To set attainable goals, you have to recognize that each student is coming from a different starting point. Some students may come into your lesson with plenty of background knowledge, while others may be hearing this topic for the first time. As a result, the goals you set for each student may not be the same. When each student is able to succeed in the classroom, they will feel more confident. By setting attainable goals, your students will increase confidence in their abilities when they succeed. The next way to increase student confidence is to express a confident attitude in your teaching style. When you teach with a positive attitude, students will feel as if you really care about them and are on their side. Students who feel that their teachers care for them will also begin to recognize that they are worthy of your attention, thus increasing their confidence. Not only is it important to focus on maintaining a positive attitude, but also to highlight positive attitudes in your students. When you focus on the positive aspects of your classroom, you increase the student’s sense of self-worth and at the same time increase their confidence. The final way to increase confidence in your students is to build on the strengths your students already possess. It is important to create opportunities for which your students can use the gifts and abilities that they already have. This can be accomplished by taking a pre-assessment of what your students already know. Before you being each lesson, you should get a sense of what the students already know. This way you can plan your lesson around building off their strengths. Another way to asses student’s strengths and weaknesses is to you exit slips. An exit slip is a 5-minute quiz, journal entry, or quick note, that your students hand into you on your way out of class. Once you know your students' strengths and weaknesses and then plan your lesson around them, you will increase your students' confidence. Increasing a student’s level of confidence is one of the toughest jobs a teacher has. This is one of the best ways of increasing student engagement since they will have the confidence to engage in your classroom. While this is an incredibly difficult task, increasing student confidence is extremely important. A few tools to increase student confidence is to: set attainable goals, express a positive attitude, and build on the student’s strengths. By keeping these tools in mind, you can increase your students’ confidence.
