For Alfie Kohn’s blog posts, please click here.
For a list of articles dealing with standards and testing, click here.
Haga click aquí para ver la lista de artículos que han sido traducidos al Español.

(*) = included in What to Look for in a Classroom … and Other Essays
(**) = included in What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated? … and Other Essays
(#) = included in Feel-Bad Education … and Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling
(##) = included in Schooling Beyond Measure… and Other Unorthodox Essays About Education

Jump to , A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, V, W

A

• Abusing Research: The Study of Homework and Other Examples
• Accelerated Direct Success
• Against “Competitiveness” (#)
• Almost There, But Not Quite (**)
• Altruism Within Egoism (Book Review)
• Another Look At Workplace Incentives
• Are Humans Innately Aggressive?
• Atrocious Advice from “Supernanny” (#)
• Attorney Relishes Unpopular Cases
• The Attack on Self-Esteem

B

• B. F. Skinner: Reinforced by Life
• Back to Nurture
• Bad Signs (#)
• Beware of School “Reformers”
• Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests (**)
• Beyond Discipline (*)
• Beyond Selfishness

C

• A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs
• Can Everyone Be Excellent?
• Caring Kids: The Role of the Schools (*)
• Cash Incentives Won’t Make Us Healthier (#)
• Challenging Behaviorist Dogma
• Challenging Students . . . And How to Have More of Them (#)
• Change by Decree (##)
• Changing Education from the Inside Out
• Changing the Homework Default
• Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide (*)
• Civics Education — The Safe Kind and the Subversive Kind
• Clicking for Love
• Competition vs. Excellence
• Confusing Harder With Better (**)
• Constant Frustration and Occasional Violence: The Legacy of American High Schools (**)
• Cooperative Conflict: Neither Concurrence Nor Debate
• Cooperative Games: Discovering How Much Fun Competition ISN’T
• Corridor Wit: Talking Back to Our Teachers
• The Case Against Classroom Management . . . a Quarter-Century Later
• The Case Against Competition
• The Case Against Gold Stars
• The Case Against Grades (##)
• The Case Against Homework
• The Case for Sondheim as Existentialist
• The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement (**)
• The Crucial Steps Are the Ones We May Have Skipped

D

• A Different View
• Debunking the Case for National Standards (#)
• Dialing for Dollars
• Discipline Is The Problem — Not The Solution
• Do Religious People Help More? Not So You’d Notice
• Do This and You’ll Get That: A Bad Way to Defend Good Programs
• The Downside of “Grit” (Commentary)
• The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation (**)

E

• Early Childhood Education: The Case Against Direct Instruction of Academic Skills (#)
• Education’s Different Drummer
• Education’s Rotten Apples (**)
• Emphasis on Testing Leads to Sacrifices in Other Areas (**)
• Encouraging Courage (##)
• Existential Quizzes
• Existentialism Here and Now

F

• Feel-Bad Education: The Cult of Rigor and the Loss of Joy (#)
• Fighting the Tests: A Practical Guide to Rescuing Our Schools
• Fighting the Toxic Status Quo
• First Lesson: Unlearn How We Learned (commentary)
• Five Reasons to Stop Saying “Good Job!” (**)
• For Best Results, Forget the Bonus
• Foreword to Ungrading
• From Degrading to De-Grading
• Fun & Fitness Without Competition
• The Folly of Merit Pay (**)

G

• Getting Hit on the Head Lessons (#)
• Grading: The Issue Is Not How but Why (*)
• Grit: A Skeptical Look at the Latest Educational Fad (##)
• Group Grade Grubbing versus Cooperative LEARNING
• Growth Potential

H

• “Helicopter Parenting” Hysteria
• How Not to Get Into College: The Preoccupation with Preparation
• How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education (*)
• How to Create Nonreaders (#)
• How to Make the Least of Your College Years
• The Humanity of Humans

I

• In Defense of the Progressive School
• In Pursuit of Affluence, at a High Price
• Introduction to “More Than a Score”
• Introduction to What to Look for in a Classroom … and Other Essays
• Is Competition Ever Appropriate in a Cooperative Classroom?
• Is Learning “Lost” When Kids Are Out of School?
• It’s Not About Behavior
• It’s Not What We Teach; It’s What They Learn (#)

K

• Kids May Be Right After All: Homework Stinks

L

• A Look at Maslow’s “Basic Propositions”
• Lottery Lies
• Lowering the Temperature on Claims of “Summer Learning Loss” (##)
• The Limits of Teaching Skills (*)

M

• Men Are Still Paying for Women on Dates?
• Mind Over Matter: Inside the Christian Science Church
• Moving Beyond Facts, Skills, and Right Answers
• The “Mindset” Mindset

N

• Newt Gingrich’s Reading Plan (*)
• No Contest

O

• On Punishment for Bullying — and Punishment AS Bullying
• On Teaching Reading, Spelling, and Related Subjects
• One-Size-Fits-All Education Doesn’t Work
• Only for My Kid: How Privileged Parents Undermine School Reform (*)
• Opposing View (editorials)

P

• A Promise Unfulfilled: 150 Words on Brown v. Board
• Parental Discipline and Race
• Parental Love with Strings Attached (#)
• Paris Slide Show
• Poor Teaching for Poor Children … in the Name of Reform (##)
• Poor Teaching for Poor Students: More Reasons to Boycott the MCAS Tests
• Professors Who Profess (**)
• Progressive Education (#)
• Pseudochoice
• Punished by Rewards?: A Conversation with Alfie Kohn
• The (Progressive) Schools Our Children Deserve
• The 500-Pound Gorilla (**)
• The Pandemic Pivot

R

• Raising an UnTrump
• Reflections on the School Librarians’ “Standards for the 21st-Century Learner”
• Requesting Testing
• Resistance to Cooperative Learning: Making Sense of Its Deletion and Dilution (*)
• Rethinking Character Education: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Camp and Kids
• Rethinking Homework
• Rewards Are Still Bad News 25 Years Later
• Rich Man, Poor Man
• Risking the Wind
• Rodents and the Barometry of Tension
• The Risks of Rewards
• The Roots of Grades-and-Tests

S

• Safety from the Inside Out (#)
• School Choice Myths (*)
• Schooling Beyond Measure (##)
• September 11 (**)
• Spoiled Rotten — A Timeless Complaint (commentary)
• Standardized Testing and Its Victims (**)
• Standardized Testing: Separating Wheat Children from Chaff Children
• Stop!: An Analysis of Boston Driving
• Struggling Toward Literacy
• Students Don’t “Work”–They Learn (*)
• The Sneaky Conservativism of Ed Tech

T

• Television and Children: ReViewing the Evidence
• Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow
• Tests That Cheat Students
• The Trouble With “Back-to-Basics” and “Tougher Standards”
• The Trouble with Pure Freedom: A Case for Active Adult Involvement in Progressive Education
• The Trouble with Rubrics (#)
• The Trouble with School Uniforms (*)
• The Truth About Homework
• The Truth About Self-Esteem (*)
• This Time It’s Different … Again
• To Change What We Do, Consider What We Believe
• To Forget Is Human; To Forgive, Tragic
• Tougher Tests = Lower Standards
• Trophy Fury: What’s Behind Claims that Kids Are Coddled and Overcelebrated?
• Trumped
• Turning Children into Data (##)
• Turning Learning Into A Business: Concerns About ‘Quality Management’ at School (*)
• Two Cheers for an End to the SAT (**)

U

• Unconditional Teaching (#)

V

• The Value of Negative Learning (#)
• Value Human Life, Not American Power

W

• “Well, Duh!” — 10 Obvious Truths That We Shouldn’t Be Ignoring
• The Worst Kind of Cheating
• We Interrupt This Tour…
• What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated? (**)
• What to Look for in a Classroom (*)
• What Waiting for a Second Marshmallow Doesn’t Prove (##)
• What Works Better than Traditional Math Instruction
• What’s Up, Doc?
• When “21st-Century Schooling” Just Isn’t Good Enough: A Modest Proposal (#)
• Who’s Asking?
• Who’s Cheating Whom? (#)
• Whom We Admit, What We Deny
• Why Feedback Often Doesn’t Help
• Why I Write
• Why Self-Discipline Is Overrated (#)
• Why Students Lose When Tougher Standards Win: A Conversation with Alfie Kohn
• Why We Should Avoid Rewards Even for Boring Tasks

Back to Top