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Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Educational
Students
Learning
Done
Something

More quotes by Alfie Kohn

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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 decade
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
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Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.
Alfie Kohn
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Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole.
Alfie Kohn
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Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.
Alfie Kohn
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Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
Alfie Kohn
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Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.
Alfie Kohn
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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.
Alfie Kohn
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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.
Alfie Kohn
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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
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Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
Alfie Kohn
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In education, parody is obsolete.
Alfie Kohn
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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.
Alfie Kohn
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Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.
Alfie Kohn
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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.
Alfie Kohn
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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.
Alfie Kohn
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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
Alfie Kohn
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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.
Alfie Kohn
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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?
Alfie Kohn
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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.
Alfie Kohn