Students with Visual Impairments’ Self-esteem: Comparisons between Their and Their Teachers’ Evaluations, Before and After Participation in the Cycle of Internalized Learning Program

A group of twenty-nine students and their five form teachers from a boarding school for adolescents with visual impairment (VI) and blindness in Israel participated in a special educational teaching program. The program is based on the principles of the Cycle of Internalized Learning (CIL) model (Reiter, 2016). The program consists of a teaching guide in line with constructivist principles of teaching and learning. The program aimed to enhance students’ self-esteem and attitudes towards their disability. The program was followed along by research, in which students and their teachers filled in questionnaires that evaluated these aspects and compared between them. The major findings indicated that at the end of the program the students’ exhibited higher scores on the social self-esteem scale and on their attitude towards disability scale. Teachers’ reports did not show any significant difference on their evaluations over time; however, at the end of the program positive correlations were found between the students’ and the teachers’ evaluations. The correlations between the students’ self-evaluations and the teachers’ evaluations were higher at the end of the program than they were at the beginning. A possible explanation can be that students learnt and internalized the perceptions of their teachers or, vice versa, the teachers might have internalized the perceptions of the students.