Alfie Kohn Quotes

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

Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.

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.

Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.

If unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are present, praise isn't necessary. If they're absent, praise won't help.

Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.

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.

If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.

Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns.

Saying you taught it but the student didn't learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn't buy it.

The difference between a good educator and a great educator is that the former figures out how to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted assumptions, whereas the latter figures out how to change whatever gets in the way of doing right by kids. 'But we've always...', 'But the parents will never...', 'But we can't be the only school in the area to...' - all such protestations are unpersuasive to great educators. If research and common sense argue for doing things differently, then the question isn't whether to change course but how to make it happen.

We can't value only what is easy to measure; measurable outcomes may be the least important results of learning.

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.

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.

In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.

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.

Whoever said there's no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.

The race to win turns us all into losers.

To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.

Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.

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

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.

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.

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.

Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.