By Matt Payne, MA, Education

Why Many Students Lack Confidence

During the many years I have spent as a tutor, I have worked with many students who lack confidence in their ability to succeed in school. Most often, this is expressed through sentiments such as “I am dumb,” “I am not as smart as others in my class,” and most commonly, “I am just not a math person” or “I am not a history person.”

While all students undoubtedly have their strengths and weaknesses, this attitude rarely matches the reality of a student’s true ability within a certain area of school. Rather, students with low confidence have often experienced small failures early in their education that led them to think of themselves as “bad at school.” This is usually self-reinforcing, creating what I like to call the “confidence cycle,” whereby a student’s lack of confidence leads to further setbacks in school which then further lowers their confidence and so on. This confidence cycle leads to a situation in which many students think of themselves as weak within certain areas of school even though they are fully capable of thriving within these areas if pushed in the right direction.

How Individualized Learning Can Rebuild Confidence

I have found that one-on-one tutoring is one of the best ways to rebuild a student’s confidence. Along with receiving encouragement from an instructor, tutoring also leads to small victories in school that act opposite of the aforementioned “early failures.” These successes help student’s see that they can in fact do well in school if provided with the type of instruction that they deserve.

Individualized instruction is often most effective in this process of rebuilding confidence because more often than not large classroom settings were the problem for students in the first place. Sometimes, a specific teacher’s style simply does not work well for a student. This is not a knock on any individual teacher as certain styles of teaching may be very effective for the vast majority of students in a class while still ineffective for others.

Private tutors have the unique ability to adapt their teaching styles to the needs of individual students because they do not have to consider the needs of an entire classroom. For this reason, tutors are often in a unique position to alter the way in which students think of themselves as learners. This boost in confidence can then begin the process of reversing the “confidence cycle” so that success in school leads to higher confidence which leads to further success and so on.

Discovering a Love of Learning

Becoming a more confident learner often has the wonderful side effect of making school a less burdensome process. If a student begins to receive positive reinforcement concerning their abilities in school, schooling can transform from being a regimented process where information is forced upon students to being a journey of self discovery that inspires a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world. My overarching goal as a tutor has always been to ignite this curiosity within my students by presenting material in a way that students can relate to. I have found that once the “confidence cycle” begins to work for a student rather than against them, not only do grades begin to rapidly improve, but students often discover a new love of learning.