Alfie Kohn Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior. When our primary focus is on discrete behaviors, we end up ignoring the whole child.

Alfie Kohn
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.

Alfie Kohn
Nothing about the concept of positive interdependence requires that members of the group avoid conflict, and there are good data to suggest that they should not do so.

Alfie Kohn
Rewards and punishments are not opposites at all; they are two sides of the same coin. And it is a coin that does not buy very much.

Alfie Kohn
The real alternative to being Number One is not being Number Two; it is dispensing with rankings altogether

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

Alfie Kohn
Some people undoubtedly find it convenient to have students arrive having already been stamped PRIME, CHOICE, SELECT, or STANDARD.

Alfie Kohn
Most things that we and the people around us do constantly... have come to seem so natural and inevitable that merely to pose the question, 'Why are we doing this?' can strike us as perplexing – and also, perhaps, a little unsettling. On general principle, it is a good idea to challenge ourselves in this way about anything we have come to take for granted; the more habitual, the more valuable this line of inquiry.

Alfie Kohn