The Will to Learn : Cultivating Student Motivation Without Losing Your Own

Do the work. Do it with care.

This is a book about love. That is, the active, earnest, and intelligent pursuit of our neighbors’ good. Teachers embody this kind of love; we seek and serve the wholeness of others.

At the center of this love lies Dave Stuart Jr.’s philosophy that every teacher of every subject area in our schools has the potential to enrich students’ lives long-term through the power of student motivation. From art and physical education to science and social studies—schools can make good on their promise and this book will show you how. Join Stuart in this personable journey by tackling student motivation through

• The Five Key Beliefs of credibility, value, effort, efficacy, and belonging
• Ten strategies for incorporating the Five Key Beliefs into everyday teaching
• Common struggles for each strategy and how to overcome them
• A companion website with additional resources, videos, and downloadables

Do the work. Do it with care. These inspirational guideposts will help us all build a world in which all schools can be both productive and humane.

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

Let′s do the work, colleague. And: let′s do it with care.