March 12, 2016 The Overselling of Ed Tech By Alfie Kohn Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the idea of using digital technology in the classroom tends to be either loved or hated. After all, anything that’s digital consists only of ones or zeroes. By contrast, my own position is somewhere in the middle, a location where I don’t often ... Read More
Blog Posts
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
June 23, 2016 The Failure of Failure By Alfie Kohn A few years ago, two researchers in Singapore published a study that compared the effect of traditional and progressive instruction in middle-school math. The traditional approach consisted of having students listen to lectures and individually solve practice problems with clearly defined right answers. The progressive approach was defined by collaboration, ... Read More
July 21, 2016 Choice By Alfie Kohn Here are two ways to abuse an idea: You can invoke it to pursue your own objectives, shamelessly exploiting the favorable associations it has accumulated over many years. Or you can create a caricature of the idea and then pretend you’ve shown it to be flawed. This pair of strategies has been used ... Read More
September 6, 2016 Do Our Expectations of Kids Aim Too High or Too Low? By Alfie Kohn “Old-school” parenting and teaching are often distinguished by a failure to understand what children are capable of doing or understanding, or to provide the support they need and the respect they deserve. But does that mean kids are being underestimated — or overestimated? ... Read More
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
December 1, 2016 Narcissist-in-Chief A Psychological Take on a Political Reality By Alfie Kohn Reporter: What do you think people will take away from the [Republican National] Convention? What are you hoping? Donald Trump: From the convention? The fact that I’m very well liked. – New York Times, July 21, 2016 The initial shock has given way to a twofold ... Read More
December 12, 2016 The Case for Abolishing Class Rank By Alfie Kohn When students are rated with letter or number grades, research shows they’re apt to think in a shallower fashion – and to lose interest in what they’re learning – as compared with students who aren’t graded at all. Alternative methods for reporting student progress are not only less ... Read More
February 7, 2017 “Free-Range Kids”? It Depends… By Alfie Kohn Not long ago, the New York Times Magazine published an article about a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who turned his backyard into an elaborate play space for neighborhood kids so they could “take risks and play rough and tumble” without adult supervision. No doubt many readers smiled and nodded to hear ... Read More
March 23, 2017 Is Trump a Conservative Only by Accident? By Alfie Kohn Perhaps you’ve heard it said that Donald Trump is all about ego, not ideology. The reason many conservatives were so slow to warm up to him, on this view, is that they realized he’s not really one of them. He is driven not by any political ... Read More