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Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Never
Carefully
Whoever
Test
Tests
Looked
Stupid
Question
Thing
Standardized

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Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.
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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.
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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.
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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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Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.
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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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Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.
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Sometimes we have to put our foot down, ... but before we deliberately make children unhappy in order to get them to get into the car, or to do their homework or whatever, we need to weigh whether what we're doing to make it happen is worth the possible strain on our relationship with them.
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Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered.
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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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When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?
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In education, parody is obsolete.
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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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Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.
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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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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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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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