April 23, 2016 Why Lots of Love (or Motivation) Isn’t Enough By Alfie Kohn I get a kick out of spotting invisible threads that connect disparate theories and lines of research. Sometimes I’ll even notice a pattern (after the fact) in my own essays about different topics — which can be gratifying until I realize that the common denominator is ... Read More
Rewards and Praise
September 27, 2016 The Bonus Effect One Kind of Interest that Rewards Don’t Kill By Alfie Kohn For nearly half a century, research has raised troubling questions about the practice of dangling rewards in front of people to get them to do what we want. It doesn’t matter whether the people in question are male or female, children or adults. ... Read More
August 23, 2018 Oprah and I By Alfie Kohn My book Punished by Rewards was recently published in a 25th-anniversary edition — which must mean that I wrote the original version when I was in fourth grade. The new edition has a 30-page Afterword (not counting approximately 9,250 footnotes) featuring research on the topic that was published since my previous ... Read More
EDUCATION WEEK September 5, 2018 It’s Not About Behavior By Alfie Kohn Plenty of policies and programs limit our ability to do right by children. But perhaps the most restrictive virtual straitjacket that educators face is behaviorism — a psychological theory that would have us focus exclusively on what can be seen and measured, that ignores or dismisses inner experience ... Read More
NEW YORK TIMES October 28, 2018 Rewards Are Still Bad News (25 Years Later) By Alfie Kohn [This is a slightly expanded version of the published article, which was titled “Science Confirms It: People Are Not Pets.”] The field of social psychology is sometimes accused of doing no more than ratifying common sense, so it’s worth paying attention when its ... Read More
January 21, 2020 Autism and Behaviorism New Research Adds to an Already Compelling Case Against ABA By Alfie Kohn When a common practice isn’t necessary or useful even under presumably optimal conditions, it’s time to question whether that practice makes sense at all. For example, if teachers don’t need to give grades even in high school (and if eliminating grades ... Read More
March 8, 2021 Dewey, Piaget, and Frosted Mini Wheats By Alfie Kohn To listen to an episode of the podcast Kohn’s Zone (entitled “Skip the Sugarcoating”) which is based on this blog post, click here. In case you are not familiar with the cereal called Shredded Wheat, it is basically hay. Many of us who are members of the ... Read More
EDUCATION WEEK September 21, 2022 Why Feedback Often Doesn’t Help By Alfie Kohn [This is an expanded version of the published article, which was given a different title.] A lot of people make a living by offering advice about how teachers should give feedback to students — or how administrators should give feedback to teachers. Unfortunately, a body of compelling ... Read More
Array
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