Alfie Kohn Short Quotes

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Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.

Alfie Kohn
Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.

Alfie Kohn
Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason

Alfie Kohn
To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.

Alfie Kohn
There are different kinds of motivation, and the kind matters more than the amount.

Alfie Kohn
Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.

Alfie Kohn
It doesn't matter how motivated students are; what matters is how students are motivated

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

Alfie Kohn
Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.

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

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

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

Alfie Kohn
Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.

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
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?

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

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
Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.

Alfie Kohn
We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture - precisely when the basics don't come first.

Alfie Kohn
If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.

Alfie Kohn
Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct... and are experienced differently.

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
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.

Alfie Kohn
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
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