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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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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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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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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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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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Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.
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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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We can't value only what is easy to measure measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning.
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Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.
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We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered.
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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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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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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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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?
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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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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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Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.
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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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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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We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture - precisely when the basics don't come first.
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