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If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Feel
Risk
Feels
Share
Children
Mistake
Risks
Make
Grows
Mistakes
Asks
Questions
Learn
Safe
Feelings
Grow
Take
Trust

More quotes by Alfie Kohn

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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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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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Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
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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 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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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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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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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
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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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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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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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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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Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
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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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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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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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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.
Alfie Kohn
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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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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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Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty.
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