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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
Term
Whether
School
Going
Long
Things
Intentional
Controlling
Outcomes

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When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?
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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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Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
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Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered.
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The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.
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There are different kinds of motivation, and the kind matters more than the amount.
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Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children
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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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The overwhelming number of teachers ...are unable to name or describe a theory of learning that underlies what they do.
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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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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
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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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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
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Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.
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If unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are present, praise isn't necessary. If they're absent, praise won't help.
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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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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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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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Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
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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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