Alfie Kohn
If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.Collection: Children
Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered.Collection: Education
Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.Collection: Children
Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.Collection: Strong
If unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are present, praise isn't necessary. If they're absent, praise won't help.Collection: Unconditional Love
Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.Collection: Children
If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.Collection: Children
In outstanding classrooms, teachers do more listening than talking, and students do more talking than listening. Terrific teachers often have teeth marks on their tongues.Collection: Teacher
Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns.Collection: Teacher
Saying you taught it but the student didn't learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn't buy it.Collection: Teaching
The difference between a good educator and a great educator is that the former figures out how to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted assumptions, whereas the latter figures out how to change whatever gets in the way of doing right by kids. 'But we've always...', 'But the parents will never...', 'But we can't be the only school in the area to...' - all such protestations are unpersuasive to great educators. If research and common sense argue for doing things differently, then the question isn't whether to change course but how to make it happen.Collection: School
We can't value only what is easy to measure; measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning.Collection: Important
If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.Collection: Commitment
In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.Collection: Ideas
Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.Collection: People
Those who know they're valued irrespective of their accomplishments often end up accomplishing quite a lot. It's the experience of being accepted without conditions that helps people develop a healthy confidence in themselves, a belief that it's safe to take risks and try new things.Collection: People
Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.Collection: Stupid
The race to win turns us all into losers.Collection: Winning
To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.Collection: Mean
Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.Collection: Motivation
People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devicesCollection: People
How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.Collection: Kids
Each time I visit such a classroom, where the teacher is more interested in creating a democratic community than in maintaining her position of authority, I’m convinced all over again that moving away from consequences and rewards isn’t just realistic - it’s the best way to help kids grow into good learners and good people.Collection: Teacher
Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.Collection: School
We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered.Collection: Thinking
Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.Collection: Assessment
The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, 'The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.' If that’s true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it’s true of what we need to teach.Collection: Important
If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.Collection: Relax
Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.Collection: Two
If rewards do not work, what does? I recommend that employers pay workers well and fairly and then do everything possible to help them forget about money. A preoccupation with money distracts everyone - employers and employees - from the issues that really matter.Collection: Issues
The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.Collection: Legacy
Being a team player should not imply a demand for simple obedience and conformity.Collection: Team
It's not just that humiliating people, of any age, is a nasty and disrespectful way of treating them. It's that humiliation, like other forms of punishment, is counterproducti ve. 'Doing to' strategies - as opposed to those that might be described as 'working with' - can never achieve any result beyond temporary compliance, and it does so at a disturbing cost.Collection: Punishment
We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture - precisely when the basics don't come first.Collection: Firsts
To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.Collection: Curriculum
Contrary to what you think, your company will be a lot more productive if you refuse to tolerate competition among your employees.Collection: Thinking
Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.Collection: Tasks
Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.Collection: Difficulty
Non-cooperative approaches, by contrast, almost always involve duplication of effort, since someone working independently must spend time and skills on problems that already have been encountered and overcome by someone else. A technical hitch, for example, is more likely to be solved quickly and imaginatively if scientists (including scientists from different countries) pool their talents rather than compete against one another.Collection: Country
When we do things that are controlling, whether intentional or not, we are not going to get those long-term outcomes.Collection: School
What can we surmise about the likelihood of someone's being caring and generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer? Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have studied that question for decadeCollection: Caring
When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?Collection: Years
The legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, . . . has called the system by which merit is appraised and rewarded 'the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world' . . . it is simply unfair to the extent that employees are held responsible for what are, in reality, systemic factors that are beyond their control.Collection: Powerful
In education, parody is obsolete.Collection: Obsolete
There are different kinds of motivation, and the kind matters more than the amount.Collection: Motivation
Someone who thinks well of himself is said to have a healthy self-concept and is envied. Someone who thinks well of his country is called a patriot and is applauded. But someone who thinks well of his species is regarded as hopelessly naïve and is dismissed.Collection: Country
Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.Collection: Punishment
Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.Collection: Education
You have to give them unconditional love. They need to know that even if they screw up, you love them. You don't want them to grow up and resent you or, even worse, parent the way you parented them.Collection: Growing Up
Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.Collection: Running