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When test scores go up, we should worry, because of how poor a measure they are of what matters, and what you typically sacrifice in a desperate effort to raise scores.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Tests
Scores
Matters
Typically
Sacrifice
Score
Worry
Desperate
Effort
Raise
Poor
Test
School
Measure
Matter
Raises

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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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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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Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.
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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
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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.
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The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.
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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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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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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 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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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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If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.
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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.
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If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.
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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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If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
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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.
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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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There are different kinds of motivation, and the kind matters more than the amount.
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