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Given the complexity of societal, technological, and economic challenges encountered by schools and teachers, one may wonder whether and how teachers can still optimally motivate their students. To adopt a motivating role in today’s ever-changing, even stormy, educational landscape, teachers need more than a checklist of motivating practices. They also need a fundamental theoretical perspective that can serve as a general source of inspiration for their everyday classroom practices across various situations and in interaction with different students. Herein, we argue that self-determination theory represents such a valuable perspective. In Part I, we discuss the satisfaction of learners’ psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness as a source of student motivation, engagement, and resilience. We also present a recently developed circular model involving a broad variety of motivating (i.e., need-supportive) and demotivating (i.e., need-thwarting) teaching practices appealing to these three needs. In Part II, we discuss several implications of this circular model, thereby discussing the diverse pathways that lead to student need satisfaction, motivation, and engagement as well as highlighting teachers’ capacity for calibration to deal with uncertainty and change. We conclude that school principals and teachers do well to invest in both students’ and teachers’ psychological need experiences, such that they become skilled in flexibly adjusting themselves to diversity, uncertainty, and change.

This chapter explores the significance of blockchain technology in protecting data for intelligent applications across various industries. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that ensures the immutability and security of transactions. Given the increasing need for security measures in industries, understanding blockchain technology is crucial for preparing for its future applications.

This chapter aims to examine the use of blockchain technology across industries and presents a compilation of existing and upcoming blockchain technologies for intelligent applications. The methodology involves reviewing research to understand the security needs of different industries and providing an overview of methods used to enhance multi-institutional and multidisciplinary research in areas like the financial system, smart grid, and transportation system.

The findings highlight the benefits of blockchain networks in providing transparency, trust, and security for industries. The Responsible Sourcing Blockchain Network (RSBN) is an example that utilizes blockchain's decentralized ledger to track sustainable sourcing from mine to final product. This information can be shared with auditors, corporate governance organizations, and customers.

The practical implications of this chapter are significant, serving as a valuable resource for industries concerned with identity privacy, traceability, immutability, transparency, auditability, and security. Understanding and implementing blockchain technology can address the growing need for secure and intelligent applications, ensuring data protection and enhancing trust in various sectors.

Engagement, motivation, and persistence are usually associated with positive outcomes. However, too much of it can overtax our psychophysiological system and put it at risk. On the basis of a neuro-dynamic personality and self-regulation model, we explain the neurobehavioral mechanisms presumably underlying engagement and how engagement, when overtaxing the individual, becomes automatically inhibited for reasons of protection. We explain how different intensities and patterns of engagement may relate to personality traits such as Self-directedness, Conscientiousness, Drive for Reward, and Absorption, which we conceive of as functions or strategies of adaptive neurobehavioral systems. We describe how protective inhibitions and personality traits contribute to phenomena such as disengagement and increased effort-sense in chronic fatigue conditions, which often affect professions involving high socio-emotional interactions. By doing so we adduce evidence on hemispheric asymmetry of motivation, neuromodulation by dopamine, self-determination, task engagement, and physiological disengagement. Not least, we discuss educational implications of our model.