Alfie Kohn Quotes
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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
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Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.
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The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.
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The overwhelming number of teachers ...are unable to name or describe a theory of learning that underlies what they do.
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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.
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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.
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Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
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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.
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Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.
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If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.
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Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.
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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.
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When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?
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John Dewey reminded us that the value of what students do 'resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes.
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A preoccupation with achievement is not only different from, but often detrimental to, a focus on learning. Thoughts and emotions while performing an action are more important in determining subsequent engagement than the actual outcome of that action.
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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.
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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.
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Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
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Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.
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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.
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To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
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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.
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Saying you taught it but the student didn't learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn't buy it.