Perspective!
The Secret to Student Motivation and Success
Understand Where Your Students are Coming From!
The factors that influence students’ beliefs and attitudes about the value of formal education are complex and expansive, especially with respect to marginalized student populations. Motivational speaker and master storyteller Dr. Tommie Mabry builds from personal experiences as a child labeled “at risk” to promote empathy and understanding in motivating the success of youth.
Written in a clear style, this practical guide leads educators through shifting student perspectives on the value and benefits of formal schooling, beginning first with teacher self-examination of their own perspectives. Perspective is a holistic construct that encompasses mindset, emotions, effort, and outcomes. Layered with effective methodologies, chapters address a range of critical topics important to this view of perspective, including extensive information on
- Building positive relationships
- Drawing on educators’ empathic capacity
- Engendering trust
- Practicing culturally responsive teaching
- Igniting students’ passions
Written with an emphasis on marginalized students and adverse childhood experiences, the concepts and strategies are applicable across all student populations.
Free resources
Understanding Students Through Their Perspectives Webinar
This interactive webinar presented by Dr. Tommie Mabry provides teachers with real-world insight into how shifting their own perspective on their students can transform the educational process. By taking a deep dive into what shapes students’ perspectives, educators can better understand the beliefs, values, and experiences of students who have been labeled as “troubled” or “at risk.”
Mabry Perspective! Chapter Reflections
Each of the nine chapters of Dr. Tommie Mabry's Perspective! include three reflection questions.
Chapter 2: Should is a Futile Word
To start chapter 2 of Perspective!, Dr. Tommie Mabry explores building your students up with principles.
Use Your Service-Mindedness to Help Shape Your Perspective
This Chapter 1 excerpt from Dr. Tommie Mabry's Perspective! includes the sections "Use Your Service-Mindedness to Help Shape Your Perspective," "How to Listen," "Dos and Don'ts," and the Chapter Reflection.
Perspective! Introduction and Prologue
In the introduction and prologue to Perspective!, Dr. Tommie Mabry lays out the main ideas of the book, his background, and the definition of perspective.
In this important new book, Mabry shows us how student voices, and listening to the wisdom they often contain, can help schools to find ways to boost student motivation and engagement in learning. Drawing on his vast experience with schools he reminds us that in order to make schools more responsive to student needs we must have the courage to incorporate the views of our primary constituents - students, to create the schools we need and that our students deserve.
I am extremely excited about the prospects for this book and the impact it will make on children via their teachers. Dr. Mabry is uniquely qualified to write Perspective because “he is Perspectives.” Dr. Mabry’s personal story is extraordinarily profound. He was one of those so called “at risk” youth he writes and speaks about. In hindsight, it is clear and evident that Dr. Mabry was brilliant as a youth but his brilliance was simply misplaced. In Perspective: The Secret to Student Motivation and Success, Dr. Mabry provides educators with a blueprint for reaching difficult to reach children. Although Perspective is well researched, Dr. Mabry knows the unmotivated child he has written about intimately because he epitomizes that child – a child who went from “At Risk” Tommie Mabry to Tommie Mabry, Ph. D.
