One of the most successful ways to recruit any student's interest is by giving them choices and opportunities for personal control. In an instructional setting, it is often inappropriate to provide choice of the learning objective itself. But it is often appropriate to offer choices as to how that objective can be reached, of the context for achieving the objective, of what tools or supports are available, and so forth. It is often even sufficient to provide peripheral options—in the appearance or sequence of options—to recruit interest. Offering students choices can develop self-determination and pride in accomplishment, and increase the degree to which students feel connected to their learning. It is important to note, however, that providing choices is an important option, not a fixed feature—as there are cultural and individual differences where increased choice is a negative rather than a positive influence (see also Guidelines 6.1 and 6.2).

Individuals are engaged by information and activities that are relevant and valuable to their authentic interests and goals. Conversely, individuals are rarely interested in information and activities that have no relevance or value. In an educational setting, one of the most important ways that teachers recruit interest is to highlight the utility and the relevance of learning and to demonstrate that relevance through authentic, meaningful activities. It is a mistake, of course, to assume that all students will find the same activities or information equally relevant or valuable. To recruit all students equally, it is critical to have options in the kinds of activities and information that are available.

Students differ considerably in their responses to stimuli and to events in their environment. The same novel event in a classroom can be exciting and interesting to one individual but ominous and frightening to another. Similarly, for some students, reducing potential distractions is of great benefit to sustaining effort and concentration. For others, the presence of “distracters” in the environment may actually have beneficial effects: they study better in a noisy environment than in a quiet one. Differences in the effects of novelty, change, stimulation, complexity, and touch are just a few examples of stable differences among individuals that have both physiological and environmental roots. The optimal instructional environment offers options that, in the aggregate, reduce threats and negative distractions for everyone.

Over the course of any sustained project or systematic practice, there are many sources of interest and engagement that compete for attention and effort. For some students, a significant limitation exists in merely remembering the initial goal or in maintaining a consistent vision of the rewards of reaching that goal. For those students, it is important to build in periodic or persistent “reminders” of both the goal and its value in order for them to sustain effort and concentration in the face of attractive distracters.

Students vary not only in their skills and abilities but in the kinds of challenges that motivate them to do their best work. Some students prefer high-risk, highly challenging endeavors, for example, while others prefer safely reachable objectives with predictable outcomes. Students with emotional and behavioral disabilities may fall at either end of that spectrum. Providing a range of challenges, and a range of possible supports, allows all students to find objectives that are optimally motivating.

For some students, the option of working collaboratively with other students is an effective way to sustain engagement in protracted projects and activities. The distribution of mentoring through peers can greatly increase the opportunities for one-on-one support. When carefully structured, such peer cooperation can significantly increase the available support for sustained engagement. Flexible rather than fixed grouping allows for better differentiation and multiple roles. For other students, especially those for whom peer interactions are problematic, encouraging open lines of communication helps to develop student-teacher relationships that support achievement and engagement.

Assessment is most productive for sustaining engagement when the feedback is relevant, constructive, accessible, consequential, and timely. But the type of feedback is also critical in helping students sustain the motivation and effort essential to learning. Feedback that orients students toward mastery (rather than compliance or performance) and that emphasizes the role of effort and practice rather than “intelligence” or inherent “ability” is an important factor in guiding students toward successful long-term habits of mind. These distinctions may be particularly important for students whose disabilities have been interpreted, by either themselves or their caregivers, as permanently constraining and fixed.

In learning to set goals for self-regulation, the goals are explicitly affective—learning to avoid frustration, learning to modulate anxiety, learning to set positive expectations. The actual optimum goals, however, will depend on the individual—some students need to dampen anxiety to succeed, while others may need to elevate it somewhat. Consequently, it is essential that the models, prompts, guides, and rubrics must also be varied enough to accommodate the full range of students who will need support. Students need to see models, for example, that differ in the kinds of expectations and self-regulatory goals they set.

Providing a model of self-regulatory skills is not enough for most students. They will need sustained apprenticeships with a gradual release of scaffolding. Reminders, models, checklists, and so forth can assist students in choosing and trying an adaptive strategy from among several alternatives for managing and directing their emotional responses to external events (e.g., strategies for coping with anxiety-producing social settings or for reducing task-irrelevant distracters) or internal events (e.g., strategies for decreasing rumination on depressive or anxiety-producing ideation). Such scaffolds should provide sufficient alternatives to meet the challenge of individual differences in the kinds of strategies that might be successful and the independence with which they can be applied.

In order to develop better capacity for self-regulation, students need to learn to monitor their emotions and reactivity carefully and accurately. Individuals differ considerably in their capability and propensity for such monitoring, and some students will need a great deal of explicit instruction and modeling in order to learn how to do this successfully. For many students, merely recognizing that they are making progress toward greater independence is highly motivating. Alternatively, one of the key factors in students losing motivation is their inability to recognize their own progress. It is important, moreover, that students have multiple models and scaffolds of different techniques so that they can identify, and choose, those that are optimal.