The Pedagogy of Confidence

In her book Pedagogy of Confidence, Yvette Jackson, NUA Senior Scholar, shows educators how to focus on students’ strengths to inspire learning and high intellectual performance. Jackson asserts that the myth that the route to increasing achievement by focusing on weaknesses (promoted by policies such as NCLB) has blinded us to the strengths and intellectual potential of urban students—devaluing the motivation, initiative, and confidence of dedicated educators to search for and optimize this potential. The Pedagogy of Confidence dispels this myth and provides practical approaches to rekindle educators’ belief in their ability to inspire the vast capacity of their urban students.

Yvette Jackson shows educators how to focus on students’ strengths to inspire learning and high intellectual performance. Jackson asserts that the myth that the route to increasing achievement by focusing on weaknesses (promoted by policies such as NCLB) has blinded us to the strengths and intellectual potential of urban students–devaluing the motivation, initiative, and confidence of dedicated educators to search for and optimize this potential. “The Pedagogy of Confidence” dispels this myth and provides practical approaches to rekindle educators’ belief in their ability to inspire the vast capacity of their urban students. This book features: (1) Describes practical approaches and examples of how inspirational educators implement High Operational Practices, offering strategies for dealing with cultural disconnects, the influence of new technologies, and language preferences of students; (2) Illustrates how educators empower student investment in the “mediative learning community” to foster positive relationships; (3) Presents historical, cognitive, and neuroscience research, providing educators the rationale and benefits of changing old policies and practices to new ones that will guide students to intellectual development, self-directed learning, and self-actualization; and (4) Explores the theory and methodology of cognitive psychologist Reuven Feuerstein, upon which “The Pedagogy of Confidence” is based.

The Pedagogy of Confidence is an approach to learning and teaching that is based on the fearless expectation that all students are capable of high intellectual performances when provided High Operational Practices™ that motivate self-directed learning and self-actualization. These High Operational Practices are:

  • Identifying and activating student strengths
  • Building relationships
  • Eliciting high intellectual performances
  • Providing enrichment
  • Integrating prerequisites for academic learning
  • Situating learning in the lives of students
  • Amplifying student voice (Jackson, 2011, p. 71).

These seven High Operational Practices are the fulcrum around which the “gifted” education of the Pedagogy of Confidence revolves, gearing the objectives for each practice to facilitate students exploring and acting on their potential to produce the high intellectual performances that can motivate self-directed learning, self-actualization, and self-transcendence.   The inherent strategies and actions used to identify and build on strengths, provide enrichment and create schema that connects to a student’s cultural frame of reference inherent in “gifted education” serve to enhance comprehension that results in strengthened competence, confidence, resilience and high intellectual performances (Jackson, 2017).

Three beliefs propel these practices:

  • intelligence is modifiable;
  • all students benefit from a focus on high intellectual performance; and
  • learning is influenced by the interaction of culture, language, and cognition) (Jackson, 2011, p. 89).

Yvette Jackson
drjnua@gmail.com
Yvette Jackson, EdD, is internationally recognized for her work in assessing the learning potential of disenfranchised urban students. Her research is in literacy, gifted education, and the cognitive mediation theory of Reuven Feuerstein, PhD. She has applied her research to develop an integrated process to motivate and elicit potential in underachievers. This research was the basis for her design of the New York City Gifted Programs Framework when she was the director of gifted programs. As executive director of instruction and professional development for the New York City Board of Education, she led the development and implementation of the Comprehensive Education Plan, which optimizes the delivery of all core curriculum and support services in the public schools of New York City.

Jackson has served as the chief executive officer of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, founded at the College Board and Teachers College, Columbia University. She works with school district administrators and teachers across the country to customize and deliver systemic approaches to literacy development through instructional practices that integrate culture, language, and cognition to expand and accelerate student learning and achievement. She is a visiting lecturer at Harvard University, a member of ASCD’s Differentiated Instruction Cadre, and a keynote presenter at national and international conferences.

Jackson received a BA from Queens College of the City University of New York with a double major in education and French. At Columbia University’s Teachers College, she was awarded an MA in curriculum, an EdM in educational administration, and a doctorate in educational administration.