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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?

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Others
Best
Trying
Fearing
Make
Energies
Spending
Lose
Loses
Energy

More quotes by Alfie Kohn

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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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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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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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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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Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
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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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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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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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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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If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
Alfie Kohn
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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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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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If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.
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