Student motivation is a cause of great concern for educators at all levels, but perhaps never more so than during the middle school years. Teachers' observations about declines in student interest and confidence in academic tasks are borne out by a number of large-scale empirical studies. In this article, the author examines how teachers create adaptive motivational environments through the messages they communicate to their students at the beginning of the year. In order to assess the effectiveness of this adaptive motivational environments to students, a team of observers spent more than 15 hours with each of 10 different teachers during the first three weeks of school. They recorded all aspects of the teachers' classroom instruction and their interactions with students. Three features of these teachers' practice emerged as particularly important: viewing learning as an active, student-centered process; demonstrating genuine enthusiasm for learning across the curriculum; and maintaining relationships with students that were simultaneously convivial and demanding. Both of the teachers who created adaptive motivational environments for their students emphasized active, student-centered learning through their constant focus on students' improvement and understanding, their promotion of student interaction in class, and the ways in which they evaluated and provided feedback to their students.