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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.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Models
Proceed
Motivation
Manipulation
Behavior
Reward
Nothing
Psychological
Punishment
Model
Rewards
Basically
Conceives

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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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Contrary to what you think, your company will be a lot more productive if you refuse to tolerate competition among your employees.
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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.
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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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The race to win turns us all into losers.
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Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.
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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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Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.
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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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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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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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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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