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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.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Tongue
Classrooms
Mark
Tongues
Students
Marks
Listening
Outstanding
Teacher
Terrific
Talking
Classroom
Often
Teachers
Teeth

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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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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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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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To feel controlled is to lose interest.
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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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Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.
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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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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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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
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In education, parody is obsolete.
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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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The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.
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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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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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Each time I visit such a classroom, where the teacher is more interested in creating a democratic community than in maintaining her position of authority, I’m convinced all over again that moving away from consequences and rewards isn’t just realistic - it’s the best way to help kids grow into good learners and good people.
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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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To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
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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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Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.
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