Many struggling learners resist academics, thinking that they lack the ability to succeed, even if they expend great effort. In other words, these struggling learners have low rather than high self-efficacy for academics. It is widely believed that without sufficiently high self-efficacy, or the belief that they can succeed on specific academic tasks like homework, many struggling learners will not make the effort needed to master academics. They will give up or avoid tasks similar to those previously failed. A key to reversing this perspective--getting struggling learners with low self-efficacy to invest sufficient effort, to persist on tasks, to work to overcome difficulties, to take on increasingly challenging tasks, and to develop interest in academics--is for teachers to systematically stress the development of high self-efficacy. Fortunately, research suggests that teachers can often strengthen struggling learners' self-efficacy by linking new work to recent successes, teaching needed learning strategies, reinforcing effort and persistence, stressing peer modeling, teaching struggling learners to make facilitative attributions, and helping them identify or create personally important goals. For these strategies to be effective, however, struggling learners with low self-efficacy must succeed on the very type of tasks they expect to fail. This strongly suggests that classwork must be at their proper instructional level, and homework at their proper independent level. Work should challenge rather than frustrate them. It should strengthen expectations of success rather than failure. To achieve this, teachers need to (a) give struggling learners work at their proper instructional and independent levels, and (b) adhere to instructional principles likely to improve self-efficacy.