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Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Individual
Incentives
Play
Individuals
Trying
Bunch
Things
Management
Driven
Safe
Risk
Dangerous
Incentive

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Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.
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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
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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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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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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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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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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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Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches it’s what the learner learns.
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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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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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In education, parody is obsolete.
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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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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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Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.
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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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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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Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.
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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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A preoccupation with achievement is not only different from, but often detrimental to, a focus on learning. Thoughts and emotions while performing an action are more important in determining subsequent engagement than the actual outcome of that action.
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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
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