Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.
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.
Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, ‘The most important things we need to manage can’t be measured.’ If that’s true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it’s true of what we need to teach.
Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students.
When was the last time you spent the entire day with only 42 year olds?
Being a team player should not imply a demand for simple obedience and conformity.
Trying to be number one and trying to do a task well are two different things.
Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.
If unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are present, praise isn’t necessary. If they’re absent, praise won’t help.
Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn’t buy you much.
We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture – precisely when the basics don’t come first.
The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you’ll get that.
If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.
Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.
In education, parody is obsolete.
There are different kinds of motivation, and the kind matters more than the amount.
Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.
Maximum difficulty isn’t the same as optimal difficulty.