Before People Build Capacity, They Have to Believe They Can Win
Uncorking leadership, learning, and the conversations that move schools forward.
Last week, we talked about keeping promises.
About taking the thing we wrote in the strategic plan and making sure it survives the long journey from regional leader to principal to coach to teacher to student.
Because apparently writing “Improve Tier I Instruction” in bold font does not, by itself, improve Tier I instruction.
Rude.
But there is another problem hiding inside that cascade.
Eventually, the strategy reaches an actual human being.
And that human being may be thinking:
I don’t think I can do this.
That’s a capacity problem we don’t talk about enough.
Not Can they do it?
Do they believe their actions can actually produce the result we’re collectively asking for?
Those are different questions.
Sometimes, before people can own that belief themselves, they have to borrow a little of ours.
We Throw Around “Build Capacity” A Lot
Education leaders love the phrase build capacity.
I use it. You use it. Someone has definitely put it in a strategic plan.
But what exactly are we building?
Knowledge matters.
Skill matters.
Practice matters.
Resources matter.
Good coaching absolutely matters.
But people also need to develop something psychologist Albert Bandura spent decades studying:
self-efficacy.
In simple terms, self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their capability to organize and execute the actions needed to accomplish a particular task.
Notice what it isn’t.
It isn’t:
“I’m amazing.”
It isn’t confidence in everything.
It isn’t a motivational poster.
And it definitely isn’t me standing beside you yelling:
“YOU’VE GOT THIS!”
while you are thinking:
I very clearly do not got this.
Self-efficacy is more specific.
I believe I can do this thing. And that belief matters because it affects whether people attempt difficult tasks, how much effort they invest, and how long they persist when things get hard.
Which sounds fairly relevant to teaching.
And coaching.
And leading.
And basically everything we ask educators to do before 10:00 a.m.
You Cannot Compliment Someone Into Efficacy
This is where leadership gets interesting.
We often try to build confidence through encouragement.
“You’re a great teacher.”
“You’ve got this.”
“I believe in you.”
Those things matter. People need encouragement.
But Bandura’s work suggests that one of the most powerful sources of efficacy is something much more concrete:
mastery experiences.
You tried something.
It worked.
You now possess evidence that your behavior can influence an outcome.
That’s different from me telling you you’re capable.
You saw yourself be capable.
That’s the good stuff.
And it changes how I think about coaching.
Small Wins Aren’t Small
Imagine a first-grade teacher working with students who are Well Below Benchmark in early literacy as measured by DIBELs.
We’ve looked at the data. We’ve identified a problem.
Students aren’t getting enough opportunities to segment and blend words successfully during the phonics block.
The coach could say:
“You need to increase student practice.”
Accurate.
The coach could observe for a week and send a detailed email containing seventeen pieces of feedback.
Also possible.
Or the coach and teacher could identify one move:
Tomorrow, let’s intentionally create 20 meaningful at-bats for these students.
Not seventeen things.
One.
They plan it.
The teacher tries it.
The coach watches.
And then they look at student responses.
Three students who had been getting zero correct are suddenly getting one or two.
Stop.
Don’t immediately move to the next problem.
Name what just happened.
“You increased the number of opportunities students had to practice. Look at Marcus. Look at Jada. Look at Amir. They responded differently. Your change produced a change for kids.”
That’s not empty praise. That’s evidence. And evidence is powerful.
The teacher didn’t just hear:
You’re getting better.
The teacher experienced:
Something I did made students more successful.
That is a completely different kind of confidence. It is teacher identity affirming confidence. Remember, teacher’s identity is “I am good for kids.” They need to see that they mattered in the daily success of children.
Make the Win Attributable
This part matters. A win alone isn’t always enough.
People have to be able to connect the win to something they did. Otherwise, improvement can feel accidental.
“Maybe the lesson was easier.”
“Maybe they just had a good day.”
“Maybe those kids already knew it.”
A strong coach helps make the causal connection visible.
You did X. Students responded with Y. Let’s see whether it happens again.
That’s why your coaching outcome should be close enough to observe and small enough to achieve within a short cycle.
If I tell a struggling teacher:
“By May, 70% of your students will be proficient readers.”
That is an important outcome. It is also February. May feels approximately 400 years away when measured by days in Kindergarten, 5th grade, or 7th grade (Correction: research shows it is actually 700 years away in 7th grade).
But:
“Over the next ten instructional days, let’s get these six students from 0/4 to at least 2/4 on this skill.”
Now we can work. You didn’t lower the bar, you built a staircase to it.
Sometimes People Need to Borrow Your Belief
There have been people I’ve coached when I could see something in them they couldn’t see yet.
I’m sure someone has done the same for me. That’s leadership.
Sometimes the person sitting across from you has accumulated more evidence of failure than evidence of success.
Their lesson bombed. The data didn’t move. They got difficult feedback. They’ve changed strategies three times. They’re working incredibly hard and getting very little reinforcement from the results.
Then we enter with:
“You need to have a growth mindset.”
Please don’t. Not yet. They may not need a mindset intervention.
They may need a win.
And until they get one, they may need to borrow some of your belief.
I see what you cannot see yet. And I’m going to stay close enough to help you collect the evidence.
That is very different from rescuing someone. Borrowed belief doesn’t mean I lower expectations. It doesn’t mean I pretend performance is stronger than it is. It doesn’t mean I do the work for you. Actually, it requires the opposite.
I believe enough in your ability to grow that I will not confuse support with rescue.
I will help you choose the move. I will practice it with you. I may model it. I’ll watch you try. We’ll look at what happened. Then you’re going to try it again. Eventually, my belief in you has to become your evidence about yourself.
Don’t Steal the Win
Leaders can accidentally mess this up.
Imagine the teacher tries the move and students improve.
The coach says:
“Great! My coaching strategy worked.”
Hold on.
It may have.
But be careful.
The teacher needs ownership of that success.
A leader who constantly positions themselves as the source of improvement can create dependency instead of capacity.
The goal of coaching isn’t:
Look how much better you are when I’m here.
The goal is:
Look what you now know how to do.
That’s a profound difference.
One creates dependence. The other creates efficacy. If I coach you forever and you leave every conversation believing I am the reason you’re successful, I may have developed a very loyal coachee. I have not necessarily developed a stronger professional.
The best coaching should eventually make some of itself unnecessary.
I want you leaving the room thinking:
I did that.
Not:
Thank goodness she saved me.
Collective Belief Matters Too
Here’s where this gets even bigger than individual coaching.
Researchers studying collective teacher efficacy have examined what happens when a faculty shares the belief that, together, they can positively affect students.
That is more than having a positive staff culture.
It isn’t:
We love our team! ❤️
It is:
Together, we know how to produce learning.
Those are very different staff T-shirts.
Research by Roger Goddard and colleagues has linked collective teacher efficacy with student achievement, even while accounting for student background factors. John Hattie’s syntheses have also helped make collective teacher efficacy a widely discussed concept in school improvement, although effect-size rankings should be interpreted carefully rather than treated as a simple league table of interventions.
The larger point matters:
What a faculty collectively believes about its ability to influence students can shape what adults attempt, persist through, and learn from together.
But I don’t think we create that belief by announcing:
“WE BELIEVE ALL CHILDREN CAN LEARN.”
Again, excellent poster.
Show me the evidence adults are accumulating together.
A grade level figures out how to move a group of readers that historically grow at a slower rate than the norm.
Study it.
Name what worked.
Repeat it.
Another teacher tries the approach.
It works there too.
Share it.
A coach sees a pattern across classrooms.
Make it visible.
A principal protects time for the team to understand why the change worked.
Now we’re building something.
One successful teacher begins thinking:
I can do this.
Then a team begins thinking:
We can do this.
Eventually, an organization starts believing:
When students aren’t learning, we know how to respond.
That is capacity.
This Is Why Your Cascade Needs Short Cycles
This is also why I keep pushing leaders toward short improvement cycles.
Blog #10 ended with a question:
If every adult does their part, what should be different for students in 10 days?
Ten days isn’t magical. The principle is. The feedback loop has to be short enough for adults to see the relationship between what they changed and what students did next.
Teacher action.
Student response.
Coach action.
Teacher response.
Principal action.
Coach response.
Regional action.
Principal response.
That’s not just a cascade of accountability.
It’s a cascade of efficacy.
At every level, someone should be accumulating evidence:
My actions matter.
And that may be one of the most powerful things a system can teach its adults.
Don’t Confuse Efficacy With Lowering the Bar
There is a trap here.
Small wins can become small expectations.
That’s not what I’m arguing.
The destination remains ambitious.
Students still need grade-level instruction.
Teachers still need strong practice.
Coaches still need to produce meaningful development.
Principals still need to lead.
We aren’t lowering the mountain.
We’re building the next foothold.
In fact, I would argue that this is how you maintain high expectations without destroying people.
You hold the long-term bar. Then you make the next move achievable, measurable, and visible.
High expectations tell people where we’re going. Small wins give them evidence that we can get there. We need both.
Capacity Should Expand
Here’s the test I increasingly use for development:
Can this person do something today that they could not do six weeks ago?
Not:
Did we meet?
Did I coach them?
Did they attend PD?
Did they complete the action step?
Those are inputs.
I want to know whether their capacity expanded.
Can the teacher now diagnose a misconception without the coach?
Can the coach now determine the right action without the principal?
Can the principal now identify the system problem without waiting for the regional leader?
Can the regional leader develop that same capacity across multiple schools?
If yes, something important happened.
The organization got stronger because more people became capable of doing the work.
Final Sip
There will be moments in leadership when you believe in someone more than they believe in themselves.
That’s okay. Let them borrow it. But don’t leave them there. Give them something small enough to attack and important enough to matter. Help them practice. Stay close. Look at the evidence.
When it works, stop long enough to name why.
You did this.
Students responded.
That wasn’t luck.
Then raise the bar a little.
Try again.
Another win.
More evidence.
More capacity.
Until one day, the person who used to look at you and say:
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
starts saying:
“I know what I’m going to try.”
That’s the moment. The goal was never for them to believe in you as their coach.
The goal was for your belief to become unnecessary.
At first, they borrowed it.
Then they built evidence.
Eventually, they owned it.
That’s efficacy.
That’s capacity.
And that’s how organizations get stronger, one attributable win at a time.
Take another sip.
Then find someone you’re developing and ask yourself:
What is the next win they need to experience to believe something new about what they’re capable of?
Don’t give them a pep talk.
Help them earn the evidence.
Sip Wisdom: Recommended Reading
Albert Bandura — Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997).
This is the foundational text behind the post. Bandura identifies four major sources of efficacy beliefs, including mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and physiological and emotional states. For leaders, the practical implication is significant: encouragement matters, but helping someone successfully perform the work gives them much stronger evidence about their capability.
Albert Bandura — “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change” (1977).
Bandura’s earlier article established the theoretical foundation for self-efficacy and its relationship to behavior, effort, and persistence. It is useful background for understanding why simply possessing a skill and believing you can successfully use that skill are not identical.
Roger D. Goddard, Wayne K. Hoy & Anita Woolfolk Hoy — “Collective Teacher Efficacy: Its Meaning, Measure, and Impact on Student Achievement” (2000).
This work moves the concept from the individual to the faculty. Their research examined teachers’ shared beliefs in their collective capability and found an association between collective teacher efficacy and differences in student achievement.
John Hattie — Visible Learning and subsequent work on collective teacher efficacy.
Hattie’s synthesis helped bring collective teacher efficacy into mainstream education leadership conversations. I would use his work as an entry point rather than turning an effect-size ranking into a prescription. The useful leadership question is less Where does this rank? and more: What experiences help a faculty develop credible evidence that its collective actions can improve student learning?
One More Sip
At your next coaching meeting, don’t just ask:
“What’s the action step?”
Add:
“What evidence could we collect in the next 10 days that would show this person their actions are working?”
Because sometimes building capacity begins before capacity.
It begins with belief.
And sometimes belief begins with one really good Tuesday.