Rachel Sarnoff

This path to becoming the educator I hope to be in the (near) future, has repeatedly required me to reflect on the experiences of my past that influence my present educational philosophy. One element that stands out across my schooling and professional experiences is my belief that noncognitive factors are as important to success as academic competencies are. Tantamount among these is a sense of self-efficacy, which, based on both my personal experience as well as professional research, is at the core of students’ ability to both take on and succeed in challenging work. I have been fortunate to have been taught and mentored in settings that cultivated this in me, and I even have experience both measuring and writing about the value of this noncognitive factor. At this pivot point in my career, however, it is now time for me to focus on the ways in which I can encourage this essential feeling in my students.  This, therefore, is the purpose of my inquiry. Now that I have both researched and experienced the benefits of a sense of self-efficacy, I will turn my attention to the ways in which I, as an educator, can cultivate a students’ belief in his or herself.

As a teacher, I believe it is my role to not only help students access the content they need to know, but also to give them the confidence that they need in order to believe that they can learn and grow. As I look back to the Practice Framework that I wrote during my first term in this program (Artifact 1), I recall that, even at the time, I was most interested in the ways that I could, “prioritize development of noncognitive factors, such as social-emotional skills and positive self-concepts, as the markers of a quality education." This emerged from a long history of my own interest in social-emotional learning, the roots of which probably go as far back as the beginning of my own schooling, but which I began to articulate when surrounded by like-minded education advocates during an internship at the Center for Social and Emotional Education in 2008. Building off of that initial exposure, I had the opportunity to go deeper into the research on this topic while evaluating educational programs as a Research Analyst in the Center for Education Policy at SRI International. There, I was exposed to the framework developed by Dr. Camille Farrington and her colleagues at the Chicago Consortium of School Research (CCSR), which outlines the ways in which the schooling environment influences students’ affect, which in turn influences their behavior and subsequent academic outcomes. At the beginning of this program, I considered my own teaching practice in the context of this framework - that is, how could my choices create a classroom environment that cultivates the affects and behaviors that I want for my students? This inquiry portfolio marks my attempts at early efforts to explore this question, as well as areas for ongoing exploration.