Quote

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

Alfie Kohn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Alfie Kohn

Image
Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.
Alfie Kohn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.
Alfie Kohn
Image
There are different kinds of motivation, and the kind matters more than the amount.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.
Alfie Kohn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?
Alfie Kohn
Image
Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
Alfie Kohn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.
Alfie Kohn
Image
Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.
Alfie Kohn
Image
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
Image
To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
Alfie Kohn
Image
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.
Alfie Kohn