Changing Attitudes: A Strategy for Motivating Students to Learn

Changing Attitudes: A Strategy For Motivating Students To Learn by Vincent Ryan Ruggiero (a pioneer in the teaching of creative and critical thinking who is currently President of Mind Power, Inc.) is a useful and sensible guide for classroom teachers to helping and getting through to their students who are scholastically impeded with negative attitudes toward school, schoolwork, and teachers. Individual chapters focus upon how to identify negative attitudes, how to show students to express their attitudes as ideas, and how to help students learn to analyze these ideas for themselves. One example is learning to replace the harmful idea of "Whoever disagrees with me commits an offense against me" to "Disagreement is not necessarily personal. It can be exclusively about the idea in question, and in that case no offense is committed." Changing Attitudes is also very highly recommended for parents who are attempting to teach their own children the basics of sound reasoning and critical thinking, as well as formal classroom educators.