Quote

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

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Children
Strings
Things
Protest
Would
Perspective
Love
Courses
Course
Look
Without
Attached
Looks
Counts

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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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Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.
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Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
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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 race to win turns us all into losers.
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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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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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To feel controlled is to lose interest.
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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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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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If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
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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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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 control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.
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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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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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We can't value only what is easy to measure measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning.
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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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In education, parody is obsolete.
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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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