As teachers and parents, our job is to teach students to tackle challenges rather than avoid them. Award-winning teacher and best-selling author Debbie Silver addresses the relationship between student motivation and risking failure, calling failure a temporary "glitch" that provides valuable learning opportunities. She explains motivational…

The 15 chapters in this book include commentaries on 12 seminal works on self-directed learning (SDL) by Houle, Knowles, Tough, Spear and Mocker, Brookfield, Caffarella and O'Donnell, and Long et al. These works were identified by a Delphi panel of 49 experts. Chapter titles and authors are as follows: "An Introduction to the Study of…