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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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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Like
Creature
Schools
Horror
Mutated
Creatures
Swelled
Movies
Standardized
Point
Threatens
School
Swallow
Whole
Testing

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The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.
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To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.
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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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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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Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.
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The race to win turns us all into losers.
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To feel controlled is to lose interest.
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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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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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Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.
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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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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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Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.
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Being a team player should not imply a demand for simple obedience and conformity.
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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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Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
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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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When test scores go up, we should worry, because of how poor a measure they are of what matters, and what you typically sacrifice in a desperate effort to raise scores.
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