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Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Erode
Punishment
Relationships
Growth
Moral
Punishments

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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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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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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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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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If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
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Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.
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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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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
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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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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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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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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
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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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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
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The race to win turns us all into losers.
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Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
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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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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 rewards do not work, what does? I recommend that employers pay workers well and fairly and then do everything possible to help them forget about money. A preoccupation with money distracts everyone - employers and employees - from the issues that really matter.
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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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