Alfie Kohn Quotes
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If unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are present, praise isn't necessary. If they're absent, praise won't help.
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We can't value only what is easy to measure; measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning.
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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.
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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Being a team player should not imply a demand for simple obedience and conformity.
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In education, parody is obsolete.
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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
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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.
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In some suburban schools, the curriculum is chock-full of rigorous A.P. courses and the parking lot glitters with pricey SUVs, but one doesn't have to look hard to find students who are starving themselves, cutting themselves, or medicating themselves, as well students who are taking out their frustrations on those who sit lower on the social food chain.
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Strip away all the assumptions about what competition is supposed to do, all the claims in its behalf that we accept and repeat reflexively. What you have left is the essence of the concept: mutually exclusive goal attainment (MEGA). One person succeeds only if another does not. From this uncluttered perspective, it seems clear right away that something is drastically wrong with such an arrangement. How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose--and fearing that they will make us lose?
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Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.
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Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.
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Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.
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We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture - precisely when the basics don't come first.
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Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns.
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When test scores go up, we should worry, because of how poor a measure they are of what matters, and what you typically sacrifice in a desperate effort to raise scores.
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Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
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The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.
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Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.
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How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose?