Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
In outstanding classrooms, teachers do more listening than talking, and students do more talking than listening. Terrific teachers often have teeth marks on their tongues.
Educational success should be measured by how strong your desire is to keep learning.
Whoever said there’s no such thing as a stupid question never looked carefully at a standardized test.
Saying you taught it but the student didn’t learn it is like saying you sold it but the customer didn’t buy it.
People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices.
How we feel about our kids isn’t as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.
We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered.
Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns.
You have to give them unconditional love. They need to know that even if they screw up, you love them. You don’t want them to grow up and resent you or, even worse, parent the way you parented them.
When test scores go up, we should worry, because of how poor a measure they are of what matters, and what you typically sacrifice in a desperate effort to raise scores.
A preoccupation with achievement is not only different from, but often detrimental to, a focus on learning. Thoughts and emotions while performing an action are more important in determining subsequent engagement than the actual outcome of that action.
Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
Punishments erode relationships and moral growth.
To be well-educated is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.
The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.
Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.
Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole.
Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have the chance to live in one today.