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Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Rewards
Sides
Doesn
Two
School
Punishments
Much
Coin
Coins
Punishment

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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.
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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.
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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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If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.
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Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.
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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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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.
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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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Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.
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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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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.
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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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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
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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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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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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Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.
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
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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?
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Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.
Alfie Kohn