Over Thanksgiving break, I was paging through a magazine when I stumbled across an interview with Don Moore, author of Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely. Even though it was targeted towards the business and management set, my inability to stop considering his ideas in an educational context led me to purchase the book and delve deeper into the science of confidence. 

Perfectly Confident is told in two parts. In part one, Moore makes a case that an individual's confidence, defined as "an estimate of one's potential, ability, or accuracy," is often well off the mark.  Be it overconfidence or underconfidence, this discrepancy between estimated and actual potential, ability, or accuracy results in unnecessary disappointment and suffering, as well as missed opportunities.  Part two explores different ways to improve the calibration of one's confidence and ways to leverage that into better decision making. Although Moore, who holds the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair in Leadership at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, is writing to an audience of organizational leaders, there are a couple of interesting implications for teachers and parents of middle school students. 

Of primary interest is the relationship between confidence and performance. Although not a central focus of the book, Moore shared several findings that are valuable for educators and parents to keep in mind. The first is that while there may be a correlation between confidence and performance, an isolated approach to improving a student's confidence does not result in a change of performance. Moore highlighted multiple experiments where researchers fostered overconfidence and underconfidence in subjects prior to testing performance across a variety of areas. No matter the type of test given, subjects in the overconfident, under-confident, and control groups performed the same. 

Days after reading this, I'm still struggling to reconcile these findings to many of my actions and emotions as a parent. Among the list of things I want for my children, confidence is routinely among the top ten. When I perceive one of my kids experiencing a lack of confidence in a particular area, it's not uncommon for me to offer a word or two of encouragement. Understanding that for a middle schooler, words of encouragement might be more impactful from someone not named Mom or Dad, I often hope, nudge, and sometimes even ask others -- teachers, coaches, tutors -- if they wouldn't mind giving my kiddo a little recognition on the side to inject a bit of confidence.

Interestingly, the "confidence" I usually refer to and the "confidence" Moore writes on are very different. Moore's confidence is a skill, which like all skills, can be improved upon with work and practice. Improving confidence, however, does not mean improving one's performance on a vocabulary test or free throw shooting. Improving confidence according to Moore is improving one's sense of one's abilities and how those abilities or characteristics compare to others.  I routinely see activities in classes meant to develop this type of confidence. It may look like a teacher asking students to predict the type of questions that will be on a test, or to predict one's score or feedback they will receive. Similar conversations between parents and kids happen every day during meals or trips to and from school and can be valuable in helping students calibrate their confidence.  But thinking about confidence in terms of calibration is rarely what I mean when I wish one of my children could get a little extra sprinkle of confidence. If I'm being honest with myself, what I'm often wishing for is for my kid to feel more competent when in a certain situation. 

Moore would agree that a finely tuned confidence is necessary to appropriately prepare for an upcoming challenge but make no mistake, it's the practice and preparation that best predicts performance.  Working to overtly calibrate confidence by aligning it to preparation feels like the biggest takeaway of Moore's work in terms of education and is something we can keep in mind when we feel the urge to give our kids a "boost of confidence" instead of providing an opportunity for them to earn more competence on their own.

Upcoming Dates to Remember:

• Thursday, December 17 is an early dismissal for grades 7-8 (following exams), and full-day for grades 5 & 6.
• Friday, December 18 is a makeup exam day for students who have made prior arrangements. There are no regularly scheduled classes that day.