Student demotivation is experienced as pain - for students, for us, for everyone. But here's the good news: student demotivation is not inevitable. It's not a sign of the times
; it's not kids these days;
it's not because of COVID.
Instead, it's a symptom of the fact that modern education has lost touch with several key realities: every one of our students wants to want to learn. Every school in the world can be both productive and humane - achievement and wellness aren't opposed to one another but instead are friends. As teachers, you and I have an outlandish (though not omnipotent) influence on the degree to which students in our classrooms experience the will to learn, and the most powerful strategies for cultivating student motivation are far from complicated. In this book, an acclaimed teacher-writer brings a new theory of student motivation to the educational conversation. Along the way, he shares the five key beliefs beneath all motivated student learning; ten high-yield, low-effort methods for cultivating student motivation in all kinds of classrooms for all kinds of students, all year long; and tactics for overcoming over fifty common hang-ups that teachers and students experience with student motivation. Let's do the work, colleague. And: let's do it with care.