Alfie Kohn
@alfiekohn
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Author/lecturer on topics in education, parenting, human behavior Also at @alfiekohn @sciences .social (Personal messages more likely to be read on )
Boston area
Joined June 2009
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It's just come to our attention here at HQ that apparently not everyone owns a DVD player any more. Ergo both of my videos - on parenting () and on education () - can now be purchased via what the kids today call "streaming"
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Kids who are described as "hard to handle" may actually be resisting the tendency of adults to treat them as things to be handled
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What matters isn’t how well a teacher holds students’ attention; it's whether a teacher knows enough about how learning happens to stop being the center of attention.
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Tchrs who listen to kids’ conversations, observe their projects, & read their writing don't need to use tests. But this assumes kids have a chance to converse, design projects, & write. If they just listen to lecs & do wksheets, there’s not much authentic learning to BE assessed
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Eleanor Duckworth: The more intensely interested a teacher is in a student’s thinking, the more interested the student becomes in his or her own thinking.
Corollary: The more a teacher just wants to see right answers, the less interested students become in their (or any) thinking
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"If they can do the worksheet, they don't need it. If they can't, it won't help them" -Marilyn Adams
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Research shows that for qualitative feedback to help, it must replace grades. When students get a comment AND a grade, as Dylan William observed, the 1st thing they look at is the grade, and the 2nd thing they look at is…someone else’s grade
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One of the least noticed harms of the standards-and-testing movement is that its focus on individual subjects (ELA, math, history) discourages interdisciplinary teaching, which begins with broad questions and problems so students can draw from whichever disciplines are relevant
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Good parents are willing to challenge themselves regularly with this question: "Is it possible that what I just did or said had more to do with my needs, my fears, and my own upbringing than with what's really in my child's best interest?"
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If only those people who keep urging us to “prepare kids for the real world” were equally concerned about preparing kids to improve that world...
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One advantage of reducing class size is that it "enables teachers to worry less about managing learners and more about managing learning."
- Patricia Handley
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I used to assume I was a good teacher because I knew what I was talking about, I enjoyed what I was talking about, and I was a good talker. The problem was that I thought teaching was about talking and so I did way too much of it
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"Teacher shortage" is shorthand for "shortage of teachers willing to work under crappy conditions and/or for insufficient pay."
More generally, as author Garret Keizer reminds us, "Our entire economic system rests on the principle of paying people less than their labor is worth."
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Observation: The more that someone emphasizes the need to “prepare kids for the real world,” the less likely it is that he or she will focus on preparing kids to improve that world
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Tchrs who listen to kids’ conversations, observe their projects, & read their writing don't need to use tests. But this assumes kids have a chance to converse, design projects, & write. If they just listen to lecs & do wksheets, there’s not much authentic learning to BE assessed
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One characteristic of extraordinary teachers is that they're not fazed by kids who challenge them; indeed, they welcome this. They're willing to reconsider what they've said, secure enough not to need to have the last word, & aware that arguing may help to sharpen kids' thinking.
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"No one has ever explained why children are so full of questions outside of the school...[but there is a] conspicuous absence of display of curiosity about the subject matter of school lessons."
-John Dewey, Democracy & Education
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The misplaced preoccupation with "rigor" in education may be related to an incisive insight by early-childhood expert Lilian Katz: "We overestimate children academically and underestimate them intellectually."
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"If we taught babies to talk the way that most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet" -Linda Darling-Hammond
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"Direct teaching of vocabulary is not as efficient as acquiring vocabulary via listening to stories, & the effect of direct instruction...fades more with time. The time dedicated to skill-building wd have been better spent listening to stories & reading":
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The sad truth is that there are parents who would rather risk having their kid fall apart at a prestigious college than flourish in one whose name their friends don’t recognize.
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87% of U.S. colleges accept more than half of all applicants, and many of these schools offer a fine education. Selectivity/competitiveness may confer prestige, but never confuse that with excellence
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Amazing how homework defenders get away with saying “Maybe there's no achievement benefit, but HW teaches self-discipline, responsibility, time mgmt...” In 15+ yrs I've been unable to find a single study that supports this folk wisdom about HW's supposed nonacademic advantages
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An essential challenge for parents and teachers - and it IS a challenge - is to celebrate kids who have the gumption to question what they're told and even to help them become reflective rebels. Instead, too many adults prefer the “child of least resistance”
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New metaanalyses (reviews of multiple studies) confirm that substantive feedback WITHOUT GRADES is preferable for student motivation & achievement. Grades were worse than nothing at all re motivation to learn, w/most damage to struggling & older students:
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The cure for boredom is curiosity.
The cure for curiosity is worksheets.
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The source of my daily despair is not that our president is a rancid racist and a sexual predator, cognitively impaired and psychologically unstable. It's that no matter how despicable and embarrassing his behavior, he continues to be supported not by 2% but 42% of Americans
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How many people have died from covid so far? The answer is 843,000, not 184,000. Let's remind our children, our students, and our neighbors that a life lost is no less tragic just because that person wasn't an American. This is a moral truth we've long failed to grasp.
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A focus on increasing "rigor," "raising the bar," demanding "higher standards," etc. usually means teaching the same sorts of things in pretty much the same way, except now with fewer students being able to succeed.
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Most ed. reforms are mostly just about making kids work harder: tougher standards! more rigor! raise the bar! Yet 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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“Essay” comes from the French word meaning “to try.” But that spirit of tentativeness is crushed when essays are graded and the point isn't to explore but to snag an A.
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Full-page in today's NYT: "New Measure Shows Where Students Learn the Most." But Stanford data it reviews have nothing to do w/learning, only test scores. When will reporters understand that real learning at best is unrelated to higher scores & often is sacrificed to raise them?
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A restaurant owner's deadpan response to people who invoke "freedom" in refusing to wear a mask:
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In my experience, the best educators are less interested in "student achievement" than in students’ achievements
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You're a student and on the first day of class you're handed a list of rules (on which you had no input) and penalties for violating them. Excited about learning yet?
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When teachers complained to Ted Sizer about a kid, he’d gently reframe by asking “What does this student need from you?”
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I understand the equity-based case for making online instruction asynchronous, but this greatly complicates collaboration, exploration, and student-centered learning, locking in a model of teaching that's only about "delivering content" - a chilling phrase if ever there was one.
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Only once one is lucky enough to experience learning without grades does it become clear in retrospect how much damage grading has done. (That's probably what Nathaniel Hawthorne was getting at when he wrote, “She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”)
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What matters isn’t how well a teacher holds students’ attention so much as whether he or she knows enough to stop being the center of attention
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I used to assume I was a good teacher because I knew what I was talking about, I enjoyed what I was talking about, and I was a good talker. The problem was that I thought teaching was mostly about talking (i.e., transmitting information), so I did way too much of it.
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Having kids read at night is presumably better than assigning worksheets, but I've lost count of the number of parents who have told me,"My child used to love reading until the teacher started requiring kids to read x minutes every night. Now it's become a chore"
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Slogan in search of an acronym: Standardized Testing Undermines the Process of Intellectual Development
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Confused about why Kamala Harris, like Elizabeth Warren before her, is described as unlikable, I fed all the data into a supercomputer. It turns out the problem results from the confluence of three facts: being (a) smart and (b) assertive, yet (c) failing to possess testicles
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Linda Darling-Hammond: "If we taught babies to talk the way that most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet"
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One requirement of good parenting is that, when you're at the end of your rope, you must somehow produce more rope
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You need to watch truly extraordinary teachers carefully to figure out how they do what they do, but to appreciate the quality of their teaching you need only watch their students
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Without grades, "my sole focus became the learning of each student & sharing my observations of that learning":
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It's challenging but essential for parents and teachers to celebrate kids who have the gumption to question what they're told, and, indeed, to actively support them in becoming reflective rebels. Alas, too many adults seem to prefer the child of least resistance.
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I have boundless admiration for teachers who help kids read good books thoughtfully without turning it into a tedious structured exercise that pulls kids out of the text and focuses them on monitoring their own reading skills
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It's possible to predict people's authoritarian/racist attitudes just by knowing what they value most in children -- obedience, respect for elders, and good manners - vs. curiosity, independence, and considerateness...
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Dropping AP: More high schools realize that a) a hard class isn't necessarily a good class, b) learning is compromised if the point is just a test score, and c) teachers & students should create their own curriculum rather than using the College Board's:
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93% of NYC restaurants get an “A” from the health dept. Does anyone whine about grade inflation? No, those results reassure us. But in education a scarcity model of excellence persists: Many students getting A’s is thought to signify mediocrity. There must always be losers.
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"The more structured our instructional curriculum and activities become, the more passive become our students" -Mary Poplin
I was going to let that damning observation speak for itself...until I realized that some folks actually regard student passivity as a desirable outcome
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“Lecturing is obviously a very comfortable mode of teaching. After all, monologue is much less risky than dialogue.”
-Chet Meyers
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With grading suspended, a teacher reports, "I am connecting with my students in a way I never have before. I am now a teacher who coaches instead of a boss who demands a certain number of sentences or paragraphs, dangling that grade A paycheck...":
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"When 'resilience' is applied to at-risk kids, it implies 'the solutions reside within an individual and not their context: "resilience" skews conversations away from equity.'” -activist Cissy White, quoted in "Rethinking 'Resilience' & 'Grit'":
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Thomas Green (1927-2006), philosopher of education, said the best question for teachers to ask students in their final course evaluation is: "What did you used to put up with that you won't put up with anymore now that you've taken this course?"
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I just learned that Heinz owns Weight Watchers, Unilever owns SlimFast, Nestlé owns Jenny Craig, and the private equity firm behind Cinnabon & Carvel owns Atkins. The business plan of these companies is: make us all fat, then profit again from selling us weight-loss products
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1/2 New qualitative study explores how homework perpetuates inequities: Richer kids have advantages that help them succeed w/ assignments & are then "seen by teachers as responsible, motivated, & capable." Conversely, kids who struggle w/ HW because of fewer resources at home...
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Too many educ profs "train [teachers] for the schools we have, whatever their flaws, rather than for the schools we should have" -Ted Sizer
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Nice essay from an Australian teacher on why to stop posting learning goals/targets/outcomes on the board - a relic of behaviorism that ignores the key role of unpredictable (& also implicit) learning:
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Make kids take the
#SAT
at home?? Despite all the equity, security, and privacy/surveillance issues? For God's sake, colleges, make it clear you won't accept this. Put the College Board - and this unnecessary test - out of our misery once and for all.
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I'm constantly struck by the tendency to judge colleges (& private K-12 schools) not by the quality of the education they offer but by the number of applicants they manage to avoid admitting. Say it with me: "Selectivity and quality are completely different things"
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Educational psychologist John Nicholls spent a year observing a classroom that featured a rewards-for-good-behavior program called Assertive Discipline (think PBIS or Class Dojo). Whenever the teacher uses it, Nicholls told me, "her inherent intelligence & humanity are defeated."
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Many students & families "aren't struggling because no one taught them mindfulness; they are struggling because they're fighting generations of oppression in an unjust and unequal system." A short, refreshing piece on keeping this fad in perspective:
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"Direct teaching of vocabulary is not as efficient as acquiring vocabulary via listening to stories, & the effect of direct instruction...fades more with time. The time dedicated to skill-bldg would have been better spent listening to stories & reading":
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"Do not risk ruining the reading of stories by teaching children to focus on how they're processing them" -Nancie Atwell, The Reading Zone
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One reason that many kids seem to have trouble thinking for themselves is that they've learned the adults in their lives have mixed feelings about their doing so.
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"When young students cannot pay attention to a videoconference, they are not misbehaving; they are responding to the limitations of an electronic medium....The plan cannot just be to keep telling them to stay in...their seat":
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Resilience is a useful capability to have, sure, but efforts to promote it in kids often distract us from efforts to identify and challenge the harmful practices (or policies) that *require* resilience
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What educator David Page said many years ago about math is true across the disciplines: When kids give the wrong answer, they're often just answering a different question. And our challenge is to figure out what that question is.
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According to a consortium of schools, US News & World Report has dropped to 4,879th best magazine.
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Vonnegut's reflection is a breath of fresh air in an achievement-crazy culture - and particularly welcome in contrast to the grit mindset that says kids must stick with one thing until they master it (even if joylessly) rather than sampling a broad range of experiences.
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1/2 Qualitative study explores how homework perpetuates inequities: Richer kids have advantages that help them succeed with assignments & are then "seen by teachers as responsible, motivated, & capable." Conversely, kids who struggle w /HW because of fewer resources at home...
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I've been asked my reaction to schools' having temporarily stopped grading students because of online instruction challenges due to the pandemic. Hmm. What would your reaction be to news that the CIA had ordered a brief moratorium on waterboarding prisoners due to a drought?
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There are really only two flaws with using tests to assess learning: Right answers often don’t reflect real understanding, and wrong answers often don’t reflect the absence of understanding.
(Note that this is true of teacher-designed tests, not just the standardized kind.)
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Having kids read at night is presumably better than assigning worksheets, but I've lost count of the number of parents who have told me,"My son/daughter used to love reading until the teacher started requiring kids to read x minutes every night"
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a-wards as-sem-bly n. An event, often held in an auditorium, that instantly transforms most people present into losers -- while simultaneously undermining the intrinsic motivation, self-confidence, and collaborative orientation of winners and losers alike
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Anthropologist and former college president Judith Shapiro once pointed out that the most compelling reason to get a good education is that it makes “the inside of your head an interesting place to spend the rest of your life"
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One requirement of good parenting is that, when you're at the end of your rope, you must somehow produce more rope
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Remarkable how many otherwise intelligent people still defend “catching students being good” [i.e., compliant] and tossing them a doggie biscuit for pleasing us. “Catching” people is manipulation regardless of whether it's enforced with sticks or carrots
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Years ago, Ted Sizer urged us to shadow a high school student for at least a full day in order to really get a sense of what they experience. This teacher did so and was shaken by what she found:
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I've never been able to improve on the management theorist Frederick Herzberg's timeless 10-word maxim: "Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work."
(Teachers/parents: Feel free to substitute "worksheets" for "absurd work.")
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"Extracurricular education—one that focuses on skills beyond standardized testing & rankings—creates passionate citizens who are spring-loaded for citizenship." Exhibit A: the survivor-activists at Douglas High in Fla.:
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What educator David Page said many years ago about math is true across the disciplines: When kids give the wrong answer, they're often just answering a different question. And our challenge is to figure out what that question is.
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A focus on increasing "rigor," "raising the bar," demanding "higher standards," etc. usually means teaching the same sorts of things in pretty much the same way, except now with fewer students being able to succeed
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I was once invited by a Catholic Diocese to lecture to a group of parents, but was then told I must sign a statement promising that my talk wouldn't "conflict with Church teachings in any way."
Pause for a moment to consider how *you* might have responded.
Here's what I said:
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Big study: curiosity is an important predictor of academic achievement across the board but particularly for low-income kids: . Painfully ironic given the curiosity-killing practices (scripted direct instruction, tight control, etc) that such kids often get
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If those in power decided that kids should be forced to memorize the phone book (in the name of rigor and college readiness, of course), workshops would pop up with titles like “Best Practices for Implementing the New Competency-Based 21st-Century Phone Book Assessments”
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Linda Darling-Hammond once wrote: "If we taught babies to talk the way that most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet."
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Chinese teachers used an app called DingTalk to assign homework during the quarantine, so tens of thousands of students promptly gave the app a one-star review in order that it would be removed from the App Store.
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I often sing the praises of intrinsic motivation and authentic passion for what we do. But the late Herb Lovett, discussing teachers & therapists, pulled me up short when he observed that it's a real problem "when people love what they do more than the people for whom they do it"
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“Class participation” isn’t a single entity. Look beyond behavior: Is it real engagement (wondering aloud) or just an effort to impress the teacher? (Hint: If you're grading it, it's almost certainly the latter)
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"Learning should be seen as a qualitative change in a person's way of seeing, experiencing, understanding, conceptualizing something in the real world - rather than as a quantitative change in the amount of knowledge someone possesses" -Paul Ramsden
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Dewey anticipated "gamification" >100 yrs ago, talked about covering a useless task "w/sugar-coating to conceal its barrenness" - vs. projects based on kids' Qs & experiences where "no device or trick of method [is needed] to enlist 'interest'"
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Resilience is a useful capability to have, sure, but efforts to promote it in kids often distract from efforts to identify and challenge harmful practices (or policies) that *require* resilience
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It's striking how many people fail to understand that quantified evaluations, such as standardized tests and rubrics, are no more objective than narratives & other qualitative appraisals. They just use numbers to conceal the subjective judgments that underpin them.
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Even if we use the least-bad methods, ed. psychs M. Maehr & C. Midgley reminded us, "an overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence." The more kids are led to focus on how well they're doing, the less they're thinking about the learning itself.
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Try shifting from "Why are my kids giving me such a hard time?!" to "Why are my kids having such a hard time?"
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Slogan in search of an acronym:
Standardized Testing Undermines the Process of Intellectual Development
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If the Powers That Be decided to start making kids memorize the phone book - in the name of "rigor" and college readiness, of course - we'd start to see workshops & webinars (with apps) called “Best Practices for Implementing the New Competency-Based Phone Book Assessments”
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