INDEPENDENT SCHOOL Spring 2008 Progressive Education Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find By Alfie Kohn RELATED PUBLICATIONS: * “What to Look for in a Classroom” (table) * “A Dozen Basic Guidelines for Educators” (list) * “The Trouble with Pure Freedom” (lecture) * “The Back-to-School-Night Speech We’d Like to Hear” (fantasy presentation) If progressive education doesn’t lend itself to a … Read More
Are Fewer Young People Reading for Pleasure?
November 2007 Are Fewer Young People Reading for Pleasure? By Alfie Kohn Several years ago, a teacher who regularly invited her students to “drop everything and read” their favorite books was asked by a colleague whether she was still setting aside class time for that purpose. She replied, “We haven’t been doing any reading since we started preparing the kids … Read More
The Difference Myth
BOSTON GLOBE October 28, 2007 The Difference myth By Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett We shouldn’t believe the increasingly popular claims that boys and girls think differently, learn differently, and need to be treated differently WOMEN ARE THE chatty sex, using three times as many words each day as men. They are society’s great communicators. The verbal parts of … Read More
Who’s Cheating Whom? (#)
PHI DELTA KAPPAN October 2007 Who’s Cheating Whom? By Alfie Kohn An article about cheating practically writes itself. It must begin, of course, with a shocking statistic or two to demonstrate the pervasiveness of the problem, perhaps accompanied by a telling anecdote or a quotation from a shrugging student (“Well, sure, everyone does it”). This would be followed by a … Read More
Against “Competitiveness” (#)
EDUCATION WEEK September 19, 2007 Against “Competitiveness” Why Good Teachers Aren’t Thinking About the Global Economy By Alfie Kohn Here are some phrases that might reassure us if they were used to defend a particular education policy: “excitement about learning” . . . “deeper thinking about questions that matter” . . . “promoting social and moral development” . . . … Read More
Gleanings #2: Fresh Writings on the Achievement Gap
September 2007 Gleanings #2 Fresh Writings on the Achievement Gap By Alfie Kohn Almost as much as one yearns for a solution to the achievement gap, one searches for a fresh way of thinking about this problem. Most of what’s published seems awfully familiar by now, so it’s worth celebrating the exceptions. In this installment of the occasional feature called … Read More
Changing the Homework Default
INDEPENDENT SCHOOL Winter 2007 Changing the Homework Default By Alfie Kohn The difference between a good educator and a great educator is that the former figures out how to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted assumptions, whereas the latter figures out how to change whatever gets in the way of doing right by kids. “But we’ve always…”, … Read More
Parrot Math
June 2007 Parrot Math By Alfie Kohn “Hey, if it was bad enough for me, it’s bad enough for my kids”: Many of us cheerfully acknowledge that we’ve always hated math or were never any good at it. In the next breath, though, we may insist that our children be taught the same way we were – with an emphasis … Read More
Gleanings #1: Resources on Inclusion, Gender, Classroom Management, and Assignments That Require No Thinking
April 2007 Gleanings #1 Resources on Inclusion, Gender, Classroom Management, and Assignments That Require No Thinking By Alfie Kohn GLEANINGS – A new feature in this space that will appear from time to time: Mentions of (and snippets from) articles and books written by various people — some just published, some discovered belatedly – and likely to be of interest … Read More
Close the Book on ‘Book It!’
March 2007 Close the Book on ‘Book It!’ By Alfie Kohn I once asked the late John Nicholls, an expert on motivation and achievement, for his assessment of Pizza Hut’s “Book It!” program, which uses fast food as a reward for reading. Nicholls dryly observed that the most likely result would be “a lot of fat kids who don’t like … Read More