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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
Alfie Kohn -
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.
Alfie Kohn
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Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have the chance to live in one today.
Alfie Kohn -
If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.
Alfie Kohn -
Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
Alfie Kohn -
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.
Alfie Kohn -
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.
Alfie Kohn -
When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?
Alfie Kohn
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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.
Alfie Kohn -
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 devices.
Alfie Kohn -
The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.
Alfie Kohn -
The race to win turns us all into losers.
Alfie Kohn -
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.
Alfie Kohn -
Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children.
Alfie Kohn
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To feel controlled is to lose interest.
Alfie Kohn -
Sometimes we have to put our foot down, ... but before we deliberately make children unhappy in order to get them to get into the car, or to do their homework or whatever, we need to weigh whether what we're doing to make it happen is worth the possible strain on our relationship with them.
Alfie Kohn -
Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.
Alfie Kohn -
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.
Alfie Kohn -
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.
Alfie Kohn -
To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
Alfie Kohn
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What is wrong with encouraging students to put "how well they're doing" ahead of "what they're doing." An impressive and growing body of research suggests that this emphasis undermines students' interest in learning, makes failure seem overwhelming, leads students to avoid challenging themselves, reduces the quality of learning, and invites students to think about how smart they are instead of how hard they tried.
Alfie Kohn -
Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.
Alfie Kohn -
Saying you taught it but the student didn't learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn't buy it.
Alfie Kohn