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?
Learn as if you were not reaching your goal and as though you were scared of missing it
We do not believe in the educative power of words and commands alone, but seek cautiously, and almost without the child's knowing it, to guide his natural activity.
What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it's not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, 'Hey, I can't really figure those things out.'
The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of 'The Wind in the Willows,' which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.
Before the web and these highly focused entities, journalists got to decide what was important to tell their audience and educated their readers. Now, journalists have to try and understand what their consumer actually wants to read and what angle they are looking for in order to keep audiences engaged in a highly competitive world.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.