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Book
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Punished by Rewards by Alfie KohnThe Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes (Sep 1999) |
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Our basic strategy for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: Do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train the family pet. In this book, Alfie Kohn shows that while manipulating people with incentives seems to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does lasting harm. Our workplaces and classrooms will continue to decline, he argues, until we begin to question our reliance on a theory of motivation derived from laboratory animals. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people's behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run. Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we're bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery. Step by step, Kohn marshals research and logic to prove that pay-for-performance plans cannot work; the more an organization relies on incentives, the worse things get. Parents and teachers who care about helping students to learn, meanwhile, should be doing everything possible to help them forget that grades exist. Even praise can become a verbal bribe that gets kids hooked on our approval. Rewards and punishments are just two sides of the same coin -- and the coin doesn't buy very much. What is needed, Kohn explains, is an alternative to both ways of controlling people. The final chapters offer a practical set of strategies for parents, teachers, and managers that move beyond the use of carrots or sticks. Seasoned with humor and familiar examples, Punished by Rewards presents an argument that is unsettling to hear but impossible to dismiss. See here for an interview with Alfie Kohn.
Book  Punished by Rewards (Sep 1999  ) by Alfie KohnThe Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes Unconditional Parenting (Mar 2005 ) by Alfie KohnMoving from Rewards and Punishment to Love and Reason Download  Rewarding and Punishing Knowledge SharingA presentation I gave at The Deming Forum "Exploring Transformation", 14th May 2003, Doncaster Person  Alfie Kohn Author, Speaker & EducatorQuotation  On believers by Alfie Kohn Author, Speaker & Educator On destroying the love of learning in children by Alfie Kohn Author, Speaker & Educator On incentive-driven individuals by Alfie Kohn Author, Speaker & Educator On punishment and reward by Alfie Kohn Author, Speaker & Educator On quality and working together by Alfie Kohn Author, Speaker & Educator On rewarding innovation by Alfie Kohn Author, Speaker & Educator On test scores by Alfie Kohn Author, Speaker & Educator On the convenience of stamping students by Alfie Kohn Author, Speaker & Educator On trying to do well and trying to beat others by Alfie Kohn Author, Speaker & EducatorWeblog Entry  Rewarding and recognizing knowledge sharingGurteen Knowledge-Log, David Gurteen, 15 September 2002 Alfie Kohn on human behavior, education, and societyGurteen Knowledge-Log, David Gurteen, 15 September 2002 Should we bribe kids to behave well?Gurteen Knowledge-Log, David Gurteen, 14 March 2004 Thoughts on SchoolingGurteen Knowledge-Log, David Gurteen, 26 May 2004 Death to the Syllabus!Gurteen Knowledge-Log, David Gurteen, 14 December 2007 Quotations from Punished by Rewards:  Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.Alfie Kohn, Author, Speaker & Educator Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.Alfie Kohn, Author, Speaker & Educator Some people undoubtedly find it convenient to have students arrive having already been stamped PRIME, CHOICE, SELECT, or STANDARD.Alfie Kohn, Author, Speaker & Educator
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