The overwhelming number of teachers ...are unable to name or describe a theory of learning that underlies what they do.
Interpretation
Teachers often lack a clear understanding of the learning theories that guide their practices.
Alfie Kohn's quote highlights a significant issue in the field of education, where many teachers operate without a foundational understanding of the educational theories that inform their methods. This lack of awareness can lead to ineffective teaching practices and a disconnect between educational goals and the strategies employed in the classroom, ultimately hindering student learning and growth.
In practice
In a professional development workshop for teachers, one might say: 'As Alfie Kohn noted, many educators may not fully understand the learning theories that inform their teaching methods.'
Some who support [more] coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled— those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which is used to justify the use of control.
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.
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 some suburban schools, the curriculum is chock-full of rigorous A.P. courses and the parking lot glitters with pricey SUVs, but one doesn't have to look hard to find students who are starving themselves, cutting themselves, or medicating themselves, as well students who are taking out their frustrations on those who sit lower on the social food chain.
If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose?
What could be more important than equipping the next generation with the character and competence they need to become successful
Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.
Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.
Whatever may be the merits of a religious system, its effects upon the mass of mankind must depend in an important degree upon its teachers. All instruction and all truth, except simple mathematical truth, is modified by the medium through which it is conveyed.
My law school class in the late 1950s numbered over 500. That class included less than 10 women.
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
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