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Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Independence
Responsible
Behavior
Attitude
Shrivel
Culture
Behaviors
Persons
Attitudes
Person
Caring
Useful

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Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.
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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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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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Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
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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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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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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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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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If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.
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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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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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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.
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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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Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.
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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.
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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
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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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To feel controlled is to lose interest.
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