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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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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Whose
Rights
Taken
Adoption
Making
Current
Must
Currents
Children
Seriously
Needs
Experiences
People
Adults

More quotes by Alfie Kohn

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To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.
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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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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
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The race to win turns us all into losers.
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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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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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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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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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We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture - precisely when the basics don't come first.
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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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In outstanding classrooms, teachers do more listening than talking, and students do more talking than listening. Terrific teachers often have teeth marks on their tongues.
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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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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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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
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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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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
Alfie Kohn
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Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
Alfie Kohn
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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.
Alfie Kohn
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If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.
Alfie Kohn