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, acclaimed teacher-writer Dave Stuart Jr. 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;
- 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.
What people are saying
Our School Leadership Team is reading The Will to Learn this summer and I have seldom seen this group be more excited about the learning!”
MARK D. ROLLANDINI Ph.D., Otsego Public Schools, MTSS Director
[He] spoke to some of my greatest concerns and struggles as a teacher. In 2018 when we read his previous book, we proclaimed it a masterpiece.
KIM ANDREWS, Prairie Hill Schools, IL
@davestuartjr has written two brilliant books that every teacher should read. His educational philosophy+scholarship is the antidote to burnout.
@MrCooper
The Table of Contents
What you will learn
In this highly practical, research-rich book by a practicing classroom teacher, you'll learn the following:
- Why SEL-heavy approaches DON'T fix student motivation.
- How to accurately conceive of student motivation as an issue of student beliefs.
- A simple method for ensuring that each of your students receives regular signals from you that they are valued, known, and respected.
- The sanest way to improve at basic teaching skills, one skill at a time, no matter new you are to teaching.
- How to fix habitual “dead time” in lessons as as to improve your Credibility.
- How to enjoy (rather than dread) the creative task of helping students to value school using simple, playful mini-sermons.
- How to create knowledge-rich environment for all kinds of students in all kinds of classrooms (and how to know for certain that this is what they crave).
- The best methods for helping students value the work of learning not because the teacher values it but because they do.
- How to assuming nothing about student prior knowledge can unlock your power and set you on a course to be a teaching legend.
- How to make success for students clear, desirable, and attainable through simple, habitual routines.
- A proven ten-minute intervention for when a student says to you that they studied for hours and then failed a test.”
- Understand key moments of attribution that keep students invisibly worried about whether or not they “fit in” in your classroom.
And much more!
Listen to the first 30 minutes of the book, free
Get your copy today!
- For individual orders, I recommend purchasing straight from Corwin. However, some folks prefer getting it from stores like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org.
- For bulk orders, just email me: dave -at- davestuartjr.com.