Translations of Alfie Kohn’s Books NO CONTEST: THE CASE AGAINST COMPETITION Italy (Baldini) Japan (Hosei University Press) Korea (Sannun) Germany (Beltz) Sweden (Hagaberg) Israel (Sifriat HaPoalim) Thailand (A.R. Business Press) Bulgaria (Iztok Zapad) Poland (Wydawnictwo MIND) THE BRIGHTER SIDE OF HUMAN NAUTRE Turkey (Görünmez Adam Yayincilik) PUNISHED BY REWARDS Brazil (Editora Atlas) China (The Reader’s Cornerstone) Japan (Hosei University Press) … Read More
The Grass Moment
April 23, 2015 The Grass Moment Helping Kids to Become Reflective Rebels By Alfie Kohn For the last several years I’ve been hacking away at a tangle of deeply conservative beliefs about children and parenting that have somehow come to be accepted as the conventional wisdom in our culture: that parents are too permissive and yet, at the same time, … Read More
Rethinking Classroom Rules
Rethinking Classroom Rules Excerpted from Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community (ASCD, 1996/2006) Behaviorism lives on, not only in stickers and stars but in lists of concrete rules telling children exactly what they must, or must not, do. In a classroom management program called Assertive Discipline, broader guidelines (“Treat each other kindly”) are explicitly repudiated in favor of specific prescriptions … Read More
Rethinking Baumrind’s “Authoritative” Parenting
Rethinking Baumrind’s “Authoritative” Parenting Excerpted from Unconditional Parenting (Atria Books, 2005) ….The most popular false dichotomy in parenting runs as follows: “We need to take a hard line with kids and stop letting them do anything they feel like.” In effect, traditional discipline is contrasted with permissiveness. Either I punish my child or else I let her “get away … Read More
Education as Adventure
Education as Adventure John Nicholls died [in 1994] at the unripe age of 54. In my mind’s ear, I still hear him remarking, in the accent of his native New Zealand, that the lasting legacy of Pizza Hut’s “Book It!” reading incentive program will be “a lot of fat kids who don’t like to read.” In between writing scholarly articles … Read More
Articles About Rewards
Articles About Rewards * “Newt Gingrich’s Reading Plan,” Education Week, April 19, 1995 * “Punished by Rewards?: A Conversation with Alfie Kohn,” Educational Leadership, Sept. 1995 * “The Risks of Rewards,” ERIC Digest, December 1994 * “Five Reasons to Stop Saying ‘Good Job!’”, Young Children, September 2001 For more, please see the book Punished by Rewards Articles About Grades * … Read More
Introduction to “More Than a Score”
Introduction to More Than a Score 2014 Introduction More than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Tests, edited by J. Hagopian (Haymarket Books, 2014) By Alfie Kohn In early March of 1999, on a chilly Sunday morning in San Francisco, more than a thousand educators packed into a huge convention center space during ASCD’s annual conference. They were … Read More
What to Look for in a Classroom – (Book)
What to Look for in a Classroom ... and Other Essays (San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998) Through his writings and speeches, Alfie Kohn has been stirring up controversy for years, demonstrating how the conventional wisdom about education often isn't supported by the available research, and illuminating the gaps between our long-term goals for students and what actually goes on in schools. ... Read More
Feel-Bad Education – (Book)
Feel-Bad Education And Other Contrarian Essays on Children & Schooling (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011) Arguing that our schools are currently in the grip of a "cult of rigor" -- a confusion of harder with better that threatens to banish both joy and meaningful intellectual inquiry from our classrooms -- Alfie Kohn issues a stirring call to rethink our priorities and ... Read More
Unconditional Parenting – (Book)
Unconditional Parenting Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason (Atria Books, 2005)(Tantor audio, 2016) Most parenting guides begin with the question "How can we get kids to do what they're told?" -- and then proceed to offer various techniques for controlling them. In this truly groundbreaking book, nationally respected educator Alfie Kohn begins instead by asking "What do ... Read More