The author, a former early grades teacher, recounts how she overcome erratic curriculum implementation to find her own way to effective reading instruction. What worked for her was an emphasis on explicit phonics in the context of providing engaging and relevant reading material for her students. "As a matter of educating the whole…

What if, despite good intentions, the words you are using to involve students in discussion are actually shutting them out? Education consultant Mike Anderson presents three common errors that teachers use in posing questions and making comments and offers a few simple shifts that can make all the difference.

Students with anxiety are prone to giving up a difficult work assignment before they even start it. So how can teachers help these students develop skills to successfully start and finish assignments and succeed in school? Behavioral analyst Jessica Minahan offers some practical solutions that teachers can implement in the classroom to motivate…

Do your students occasionally seem bored? That's ok, says John Spencer. Doing tedious tasks or spending some time without stimulation can actually be great for creativity, freeing up your brain to make connections it might not otherwise have made. Spencer walks us through why our modern culture is so resistant to boredom and how we can cultivate…

Hart shares the story of a high school student who was unmotivated by traditional academic work and on a downward trajectory--until he enrolled in a program that allowed him to take vocationally oriented classes at a community college while in high school. Content that was relevant and meaningful to him (EMT and firefighter training) led Max to…

Deeper learning is great for exploring a topic in great depth, but it will fail if student motivation isn't taken into account. Researchers Eric Anderman and Adriana Calvit discuss how to align your deeper learning curriculum with motivational strategies for successful lessons.

This article shares what "Educational Leadership" authors have to say about doing data right, which is the theme of this issue. The following questions are addressed in this article: (1) Are you using data to guide improvement?; (2) Are you looking at the right kinds of data?; (3) Are you using data to motivate students?; and (4) Are you…

A high-poverty, previously low-performing elementary school in Maine shifted its from looking mainly at achievement and test scores to focusing on ways to create motivated, confident, engaged students. They created Rise and Shine, through which all 3rd-5th graders start each day with a fun, challenging activity chosen from a big menu--from…

Human beings enter the world highly motivated to learn. It is how we invent ourselves--a survival mechanism. So when educators talk about students who are not motivated to learn, something is amiss. Either they cannot see what motivates the student in question, or the student's life is dangerously off course. In either case,…

"Data-drive instruction can distort the way reading is taught, harming the students who need high-quality instruction the most," Susan B. Neuman concludes from her research team's two years of observation in nine low-income New York City schools. She describes how some students are reminded that they are "failures" every day by…

Technology makes it easier than ever for educators to generate meaningful, ongoing data to inform their teaching, track student progress, and personalize learning. When the author began to explore how she could use technology to quickly assess student skills, data became exciting and took on a new role in her teaching practice. Now she uses data…

When the author and her colleague asked teachers to list which qualities were most important without giving them a list to choose from, almost none mentioned curiosity. Many teachers endorse curiosity when they are asked about it, but it is not uppermost on their minds--or shaping their teaching plans. Why is this disturbing? Because research…

What happens when teachers, neuroscientists, and students combine their perspectives in a three-way dialogue about why selected classroom lessons were highly motivating? They discover that the factors that teachers and students believe important to student motivation are solidly aligned with insights from neuroscience. Author Kathleen Cushman…

Sixth grade language arts teacher Julie Ramsay was disheartened at her students' lack of interest in writing, so she began looking at what they were doing online to see if she could bring some of those experiences to the classroom. She saw that students enjoyed having opportunities to share their experiences with an audience and receive…

Educators and policymakers have expressed considerable enthusiasm for engaging students with data. In this article, the authors consider how teachers commonly examine data with their students, and how these practices are likely to affect student motivation. Combining motivation research with their own study of teachers in six middle schools that…