Developing Confidence through Writing

Writing teachers in various educational settings can appreciate the simple and self-affirming writing activity suggested in the blog post, Useful Writing Exercise for Helping Students Develop Self-Esteem. The post, located in Larry Ferlazzo’s highly-rated educational blog, Larry Ferlazzo’s Website of the Day, describes a 15-minute writing activity in which students focus on their strengths with regard to self-identified personal values. The activity recognizes that sources of pride and confidence are rooted in different values for different people. For many of us, reflecting on our values and how we live up to them is a very affirming process. The study results support this notion, and give writing teachers a concrete confidence-building activity to try in their classrooms.

As is typical of Larry Ferlazzo’s blog for ELL, ESL and EFL teachers, this post offers more than a practical teaching idea. It provides a summary of research to support the practice, and links readers to another post in the Education Policy Blog, which encourages educators to resist mounting pressure to eschew esteem-building practices (which, at the present time, tend to be negatively associated with empty praise and excessive self-esteem). The post’s links to the sources of data and to the people who have been influential in Larry Ferlazzo’s thinking, permit readers to probe deeper into the topic and develop their own positions about self-esteem and learning. Here lies a real benefit of education blogs. Not only do teachers have access to practical activities, they have opportunities to assess whether activities are well supported and align with their teaching goals and teaching philosophy.

As an ESL teacher-in-training, I find the exercise and ideas generated by this blog to be particularly helpful for second language teaching. Language minority students face extraordinary challenges in maintaining a strong sense of self worth as they navigate an unfamiliar culture. Writing tasks that allow language learners to recontextualize their self-worth in terms other than tests results and grades are likely to result in more than modest improvements in performance, they are likely to improve the odds of long-term learning success in a new culture and language community.