Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners: Strategies to Help Students Thrive in School and Beyond

Award-winning teacher, blogger, and author Larry Ferlazzo is back with more insightful research and strategies for helping students want to care more about school and learning. In his previous books on motivation―Helping Students Motivate Themselves and Self-Driven Learning―he tackled ways to help students build intrinsic motivation by how you use class time, manage your class, encourage students to feel positive about learning, help them not feel burned out by testing, and more. In this book, he looks at how teachers can create classroom conditions that are needed for motivation to grow in the first place. Ferlazzo provides research-based suggestions on what you can do today to help students want to develop qualities like physical health, grit, flow, and a desire to transfer what they’re learning to life outside of school.

At the end of each chapter, you’ll find high-interest lesson plans, correlated to the Common Core ELA/Literacy Standards, that set the stage for long-term positive impacts. Students will read about sports stars, how maintaining a healthy lifestyle can help them achieve their goals, and other engaging topics. They will integrate information from various texts and make connections to their own lives, hopes and dreams―a more powerful way to learn to care than being told they should. The readings for these lessons and other tools are available as free eResources on our website so you can easily print them for your students.

Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo) is an award-winning teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. He writes a popular education blog and a teacher advice column for Education Week Teacher.