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Roland Gesthuizen

The Risks of Rewards - 54 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...ror.htm

reward punishment discipline teaching learning behaviour AlfieKohn

shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 18 Jul 12 - Cached
  • Control, whether by threats or bribes, amounts to doing things to children rather than working with them. This ultimately frays relationships
  • The alternative to bribes and threats is to work toward creating a caring community whose members solve problems collaboratively and decide together how they want their classroom to be
  • grades in particular have been found to have a detrimental effect on creative thinking, long-term retention, interest in learning, and preference for challenging tasks
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • good values have to be grown from the inside out. Attempts to short-circuit this process by dangling rewards in front of children are at best ineffective, and at worst counterproductive
  • Children are likely to become enthusiastic, lifelong learners as a result of being provided with an engaging curriculum; a safe, caring community in which to discover and create; and a significant degree of choice about what (and how and why) they are learning
  • Unfortunately, carrots turn out to be no more effective than sticks at helping children to become caring, responsible people or lifelong, self-directed learners
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 18 Jul 12
     
    "Many educators are acutely aware that punishment and threats are counterproductive. Making children suffer in order to alter their future behavior can often elicit temporary compliance, but this strategy is unlikely to help children become ethical, compassionate decision makers. Punishment, even if referred to euphemistically as "consequences," tends to generate anger, defiance, and a desire for revenge. Moreover, it models the use of power rather than reason and ruptures the important relationship between adult and child."
Roland Gesthuizen

How to Create Nonreaders - 58 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...nonreaders.htm

reading motivation writing literacy education AlfieKohn learning

shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 12 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 12 Nov 13
     
    "In fact, it's not really possible to motivate anyone, except perhaps yourself.  If you have enough power, sure, you can make people, including students, do things.  That's what rewards (e.g., grades) and punishments (e.g., grades) are for.  But you can't make them do those things well ... The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as a matter of fact, the less interest students are likely to have in whatever they were induced to do."
Roland Gesthuizen

Punitive Damages - 35 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...punishment.htm

punishment discipline behaviour AlfieKohn

shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 26 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 26 Mar 15
     
    To punish kids, very simply, is to make something unpleasant happen to them -- or prevent them from experiencing something pleasant - usually with the goal of changing their future behavior.  The punisher makes them suffer, in other words, to teach them a lesson
Jason Schmidt

School Would Be Great If It Weren't for the Damn Kids - 95 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...damnkids.htm

school alfie kohn students edreform education interest current commentary

shared by Jason Schmidt on 17 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • It simply doesn’t make sense to try to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.”  His listener, almost giddy with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers the punch line:  That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start . . . blaming students!
  • His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)
  • As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating? 
  • Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”
  • The more you reward people for doing something, or for doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward. 
  • People who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat their corporations.  The sort of schooling that results is the type almost guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
  • one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning is just a means to an end.
  • Another thing that’s happened is teaching that’s meant primarily to raise test scores.
  • inner-city kids get the worst of the sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read: obedient).
  • “Motivation is weak because more students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.”  But why don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his premise is correct, they don’t succeed)?  What has happened to their desire to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which all children start out? 
  • if you want to see (intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but meaningful.
  • Jason Schmidt on 17 Nov 10
     
    Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
Benjamin Light

The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - 83 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...tcooa.htm

assessment grading achievement education kohn

shared by Benjamin Light on 13 May 11 - Cached
  • First, students tend to lose interest in whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up, motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of traditional grades.
    • Deb White Groebner
      Deb White Groebner on 13 May 11
       
      SO true!
    • Terie Engelbrecht
      Terie Engelbrecht on 27 Jun 11
       
      Very true; especially the "avoiding challenging tasks" part.
  • Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to figure out who is better than whom)
  • Standardized tests often have the additional disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • The test designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage to answer correctly.
  • the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
  • 1. Students come to regard learning as a chore.
  • intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
  • 2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
  • they’re just being rational. They have adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see what they’re capable of doing.
  • 3. Students tend to think less deeply.
  • 4. Students may fall apart when they fail.
  • 5. Students value ability more than effort
    • Deb White Groebner
      Deb White Groebner on 13 May 11
       
      This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
  • They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it.
  • When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.
  • It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.
  • But even when better forms of assessment are used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less important than why she thinks she got that score.
  • just smart
  • luck:
  • tried hard
  • task difficulty
  • It bodes well for the future
  • the punch line: When students are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
  • In their study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside their control, such as a lack of ability.
  • When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.
  • And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as "smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect on other kids.
  • The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.
  • the problem with tests is not limited to their content.
  • if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
  • As Martin Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence."
  • Only now and then does it make sense for the teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in learning.
  • the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.
  • The underlying problem concerns a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and focusing on what you’re doing.
  • The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
  • But when we get carried away with results, we wind up, paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
  • Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and design of the most common forms of assessment--both within classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous consequences.
  • grades, which by their very nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to school.
  • research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.
  • Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills,
    • Benjamin Light
      Benjamin Light on 19 Nov 12
       
      I wonder how the MAP test is set?
  • Rob Reynolds on 14 May 11
     
    The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.
  • Terie Engelbrecht on 27 Jun 11
     
    Excellent summary!
Steve Ransom

Alfie Kohn News and Comments - 37 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...news.php

tedsizer geraldbracey alfiekohn blogpost

shared by Steve Ransom on 24 Oct 09 - Cached
  • “façade of orderly purposefulness”
    • Steve Ransom
      Steve Ransom on 24 Oct 09
       
      Great metaphor here!
  • “Tell me the incomes of your students’ families,” he wrote, “and I’ll describe to you your school.”
    • Steve Ransom
      Steve Ransom on 24 Oct 09
       
      A sad but true reality.
  • Steve Ransom on 24 Oct 09
     
    Nice tribute to Ted Sizer and Gerald Bracey
Chema Falcó

Progressive Labels for Regressive Practices - Alfie Kohn - 19 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...regressive

co-opt renovacion-metodologica

shared by Chema Falcó on 26 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Chema Falcó on 26 Jun 16
     
    Términos de renovación metodológica neutralizados al apropiárselos las metodologías de siempre
Roland Gesthuizen

Why Are Some People Always Late? (And Other Human Puzzles) | Psychology Today - 30 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...s-late-and-other-human-puzzles

AlfieKohn truancy tardy late timemanagement psychology

shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 23 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Try turning the question around:  How do other people usually get where they need to go on time?  What steps do they take to avoid being late?  First, they check the clock every so often, particularly when they know there's a deadline approaching.  They estimate how much time they'll need to get wherever they're going and thus what time they'll need to leave where they are.  They pause to figure out how long it will take to finish what they're currently doing and get ready for whatever is coming next.  And then they adjust their behavior accordingly
  • I suspect that those who chronically show up late don't do these things.  Perhaps they have a tendency to lose themselves in whatever they're currently doing and don't discover what time it is until it's too late.
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 23 Jul 12
     
    "why some people never seem to be on time.  Surely you know such people, perhaps quite well.  Indeed, if you can overcome a rising bubble of defensiveness, you may admit that you are one of those people.  Everyone is late now and then, of course, but I'm talking about folks who habitually show up after an event has started.."
Jeremy Inscho

From Degrading to De-Grading - 105 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...fdtd-g.htm

assessment grading kohn grades alfie kohn

shared by Jeremy Inscho on 13 Aug 12 - Cached
  • Jeremy Inscho on 13 Aug 12
     
    "Thus, anyone who wan"
Kate Tabor

Trouble with Rubrics - 2 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...rubrics.htm

rubrics review assessment

shared by Kate Tabor on 03 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Kate Tabor on 03 Sep 09
     
    A 2006 article by Alfie Kohn in the English Jouranl that looks at the dangers of leaning on rubrics to jsutify grades or make grading easy. Compelling agrument.
Gerald Carey

Homework! | - 42 views

www.theheadsoffice.co.uk/homework

homework

shared by Gerald Carey on 09 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Gerald Carey on 09 Mar 11
     
    Part of what seems a never ending debate on this subject. Anybody else got good links on the topic?
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Steve Ransom on 10 Mar 11
  • Gerald Carey on 11 Mar 11
     
    Thanks Steve. The second link in particular was worthwhile.
  • Steve Ransom on 11 Mar 11
     
    Oh, good.
taconi12

Five Reasons to Stop Saying "Good Job!" - 118 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...gj.htm

teaching psychology education psycheduc 2012

shared by taconi12 on 30 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Eric Arbetter on 30 Jul 11
     
    Thought-provoking article on possible harms of praise if motive is simply to get child to repeat behavior.  Should focus more on how child's actions made others feel.
Eamonn O'Brien

The Case Against Grades - 67 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...tcag.htm

Assessment grades grading education Kohn teaching

shared by Eamonn O'Brien on 28 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • What matters is whether a given practice is in the best interest of students.
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