The Will to Learn

Cultivating Student Motivation Without Losing Your Own

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.