Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners

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.

"Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners is another volume of the warm yet practical teaching advice we expect from Larry Ferlazzo. Ferlazzo answers the most pressing concerns teachers have about managing the classroom and reaching the disenchanted or at-risk student—and provides more strategies, lesson plans, and resources than you could use in a year of teaching!"--Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind"Having strong intrinsic motivation is the key to persevering and succeeding in school, college, career, and life. In Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners, Larry Ferlazzo offers some practical lessons and strategies on how to teach and foster intrinsic motivation for student success. A must-read for teachers as they work to support their students develop strong social emotional learning skills."--Mai Xi Lee, Director of Social Emotional Learning, Sacramento City Unified School District, CA"I've used the ideas and lessons in Larry Ferlazzo's last two student motivation books very successfully in my own classroom, and the ones he talks about in this volume have had the same positive impact." --Lara Hoekstra, high school teacher, CA"Truly one of the smartest guys in the room, author and teacher Larry Ferlazzo channels state of the art teaching into one book, compiling the best resources and thinking on student perseverance, particularly in middle and high school. It’s all here: deliberate practice, humor, transfer of learning, flow, autonomy, classroom management, competence, self-determination, feedback, and much more. Want to know the first step to both teaching smarter and motivating students? Move Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners to the top of the reading stack."--Rick Wormeli, teacher, author and teacher trainer

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.