The best way to build student self-esteem is to provide balanced feedback within responsive and demanding learning environments to enable them to achieve, according to ACER’s Professor Stephen Dinham.

 “Achievement is the foundation of self-esteem,” Professor Dinham said in an address to the. Smith Family Sydney Conversations Conference: How to create a sense of wellbeing in children earlier this month.

 “Every student needs to experience success and feel that they are progressing in their learning and development,” Professor Dinham said.

“However, some teachers and schools operate on the false belief that boosting self-esteem will somehow result in higher achievement.”

Professor Dinham referred to a 2005 paper he co-authored with Dr Catherine Scott, titled Parenting, teaching and self-esteem, in which Scott and Dinham argued that the four styles of parenting identified by US child psychologist Diana Baumrind can be readily applied to teaching, school leadership and schooling in general.

The four styles are: ‘uninvolved’ where responsiveness and demandingness shown to students are low; ‘authoritarian’ where responsiveness is low and demandingness is high; ‘permissive’ where responsiveness is high and demandingness is low; and ‘authoritative’ where responsiveness and demandingness to students are high.

Baumrind stated that responsiveness is the extent to which the adult intentionally fosters individuality, self-regulation and assertion by being attuned, supportive, and consenting to children’s special needs and wants. Demandingness relates to the claims adults make on children to become integrated into the family or class, by the adult’s maturity demands, supervision and disciplinary efforts.

“An authoritative teaching style where high responsiveness is accompanied with high demandingness provides the best model for enhancing both student achievement and self-esteem,” Professor Dinham said. “In their relationships with students, authoritative teachers and schools give a lot and expect a lot.”

Dinham’s research shows that the best teachers and schools have always been authoritative. He said that the combination of sensitivity, caring, high expectations and structure leads to academic achievement, good social skills, moral maturity, autonomy and high self-esteem in children.

According to Dinham, due to a misconception that saw responsiveness and demandingness as mutually exclusive, schooling in Australia shifted from the authoritarian style of the 1960s to a permissive style, rather than maintaining high demandingness and adopting an authoritative style.

“It was right that schooling became more responsive to the individual student, but to achieve this, it was incorrectly thought that schools needed to be less demanding,” Professor Dinham said.

Dinham argues that the permissive style’s avoidance of criticism and negative feedback and dependence on large amounts of positive reinforcement to build student self-esteem in the hope that this will translate into student achievement is counter-productive. 

 “Not making demands of students can lead to low expectations and ‘dumbing down’,” Professor Dinham said.

 “Real achievement, no matter how small, is the best way to engender self-concept and self-esteem,” he said.” “This can then serve as a solid foundation for further achievement.”

Dinham said when students have their self-esteem boosted artificially in non-authentic ways, they become deflated when they encounter real-life challenges.

 “In some ways taking a blow to one’s self-esteem is worse than never having much of it in the first place.”

Research Director of the Teaching, Learning and Leadership program at ACER, Professor Stephen Dinham spoke at the Smith Family Sydney Conversations Conference, How to create a sense of wellbeing in children, on 9th June. The paper is available from the ACER research repository at http://works.bepress.com/stephen_dinham/594/ or from the Smith Family website where additional information about the Sydney Conversations 2010 event is also available.

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