How do we help all of our students do the work of learning, with care — as best they currently can? I’ve spent the past ten years of my teaching career reading, experimenting, and interviewing experts about what lies at the heart of student motivation. What I’ve found is straightforward: for our students to flourish long-term and move toward mastery, they need to be motivated from the inside out. Specifically, they need to believe five key things.

Cultivating these five key beliefs in the heart of each learner doesn’t mean becoming a miracle worker or a workaholic. Instead, it takes understanding how the beliefs work in the heart of a learner and what evidence-based strategies most efficiently help them to grow.