As I complete my appointments, I often catch myself wondering — Did I do that right? Is my feedback what the writer needs? Omg, what if they hate my feedback and never come to the Writing Center ever again!?
Okay, I’ll admit that the last question was a bit dramatic, but I do struggle with doubting myself and my tutoring abilities. After all, the UCWbL (University Center for Writing-based Learning) provides a valuable resource to writers. As a writing tutor, I want to make sure that those who ask for feedback are getting what they need.
All I want is to be helpful, but lately, I have been struggling to understand what being helpful looks like. It can be hard to know whether you did your job effectively because there isn’t always a real-time interaction or a cute letter response situation to affirm that your feedback helped the writer.
One way to counter this confusion and self-doubt is through self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is your belief in your abilities to carry out a specific task. Our self-efficacy as peer writing tutors relates to how much we believe that we can make an impact, or, how much we believe that our feedback can be useful to a writer.
What Is Self-Efficacy?
The way I see it, self-efficacy is the first step of approaching your role as a writing tutor. Rather than focusing on the past, this concept of self-efficacy is a pre-emptive perception of how well you will complete the task at hand. Your attitude towards your own abilities can have a large impact (positive or negative) on your given outcomes.
Basically, it can be super challenging to erase doubts, but if you start looking towards the future instead of dwelling on the past, these doubts should be increasingly less frequent. Having high self-efficacy through a strong belief in your abilities as a writing tutor will make you more confident. It’s a more self-reflective and affirming way to “fake it ‘till you make it”.
Self-efficacy relates to much more than our roles as writing tutors. Having high self-efficacy and believing in yourself is crucial in pushing through difficult times, completing challenging tasks, and even having the courage to pursue your dreams.
In her TEDx Talk Why Self-Efficacy Matters, educator and coach Mamie Morrow takes the audience through her own journey with believing in herself. Self-efficacy allowed Morrow to change careers in spite of other’s doubts. In her own words, “self-efficacy is the fuel that drives change.”
How Do You Build It?
Morrow notes that scholars have identified four key factors in building self-efficacy:
- Experiencing success – affirmation that we can do the task at hand
- Seeing others succeed – inspiration that we get from our peers
- Receiving encouragement – appreciation for our accomplishments
- Managing emotions – regulation of doubts and stress
From my own experience, managing emotions is the dimension that can be the hardest to control. In dealing with my own doubts and stress, self-affirmations have been powerful tools for building self-efficacy. While you may want to workshop your own positive affirmations based on your own emotions and needs, here are some of the affirmations that help me!
- Anyone who writes anything is a writer (UCWbL core belief #1), and all writers have their unique perspectives. Thus, as a writer yourself, you have something valuable to add from your own point of view!
- You were hired at the writing center for a reason. You have abilities that are key to providing helpful feedback.
- Your passion and enthusiasm for writing and/or helping others will come through in your feedback – writers appreciate that!
The other three dimensions of self-efficacy — experiencing success, seeing others succeed, and receiving encouragement — come with practice. Each learning experience that we have is an opportunity to build self-efficacy.
Moving Forward
Whether we realize it or not, as tutors, we are constantly building our self-efficacy through our writing experiences. According to the virtuous cycle of writing and tutoring, when you grow as a writer, you also grow as a tutor (Hixson-Bowels & Powell, 2019). When we encounter new writing dimensions in our different roles as tutors and writers, we internalize that knowledge so that the next time that same dimension comes up, we will know what to do. We take the knowledge that we gain in appointments or in the classroom and transfer it to our writing and tutoring practices.
Self-efficacy is one of the most important tools that we have as tutors. It can be easy to succumb to our doubts; however, by consciously believing in your future self, unconsciously internalizing new skills, and managing your emotions through self-affirmations, your self-efficacy and self-confidence will grow.
If you’re interested in reading more about self-efficacy in writing centers, check out chapter eight in the digital collection: How We Teach Writing Tutors.
Now go forth and believe in yourself because you are great 🙂
Works Cited
Hixson-Bowels, K., & Powell, R. (2019). Self-efficacy and the relationship between tutoring and writing. In Johnson, K. G., Roggenbuck, T. & Conzo, C. (Eds.), How we teach writing tutors. WLN. https://wlnjournal.org/digitaleditedcollection1/index.html
Morrow, M. [TEDx]. (2019, May 29). Why self-efficacy matters | Mamie Morrow | TEDxFSCJ [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J51ncHP_BrY