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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
Stupid
Question
Thing
Standardized
Never
Carefully
Whoever
Test
Tests
Looked

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Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.
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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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Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.
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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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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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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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If unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are present, praise isn't necessary. If they're absent, praise won't help.
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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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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
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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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Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.
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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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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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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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Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
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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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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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In education, parody is obsolete.
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