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When we do things that are controlling, whether intentional or not, we are not going to get those long-term outcomes.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Going
Long
Things
Intentional
Controlling
Outcomes
Term
Whether
School

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Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
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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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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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To feel controlled is to lose interest.
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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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The race to win turns us all into losers.
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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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If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
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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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We can't value only what is easy to measure measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning.
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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
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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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Saying you taught it but the student didn't learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn't buy it.
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Those who know they're valued irrespective of their accomplishments often end up accomplishing quite a lot. It's the experience of being accepted without conditions that helps people develop a healthy confidence in themselves, a belief that it's safe to take risks and try new things.
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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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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
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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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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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Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.
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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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