You say you want this, so then why are you doing that? If we want school to improve, we need school to look a little less like school.

1. You say you want this... so then why are you doing that? www.joebower.org joe.bower.teache [email_address] @joe_bower

3. What's wrong with this picture?

11. When do we stop blaming the kids?

13. We tend to parent the way we were parented, and taught the way we were taught.

14. If you never change your mind, why have one?

15. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. -Anthony Robbins

16. Insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein

18. It ain’t what we don’t know that gets us into trouble... it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so. -Mark Twain

19. However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. -Winston Churchill

20. We need school to look a little less like school

21. What if kids who hated school became teachers?

22. homework grading rewards punishment discipline hand raising multiple choice honours competition testing lecturing standardization lesson planning curriculum

26. The more you use power to try and control people, the less real influence you’ll have on their lives.

28. The hardest kids to like are the ones who need us the most

29. What has made you feel so bad in your life that you feel someone has to share your pain? -Sean Grainger

33. Grades cause an emotional reaction - either positive or negative. Feedback causes you to think, which is reflective learning. -Dylan William

34. Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools. -Steven Covey

35. Never grade students while they are still learning something and, even more important, do not reward them for their performance. -Alfie Kohn

36. A mark or a grade is an inadequate report of an in accurate judgement by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material. -Paul Dressel

37. Students should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information. -Jerome Bruner

38. Every rubric I have ever seen involves the use of a fixed measurement scale.

39. Gather ------> Share

40. Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades. -Alfie Kohn

41. We must constantly remind ourselves that the ultimate purpose of evaluation is to enable students to evaluate themselves. -Art Costa

45. Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid. -Albert Einstein

47. A correct answer on a test does not necessarily signal understanding, and a wrong answer does not necessarily signal an absence of understanding.

48. The bane of reducing learning to a symbol is that it inevitably overvalues whatever can be quantified and undervalues what cannot

49. Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts. -Albert Einstein

50. There is a big difference between measuring what we value and valuing what we measure.

51. Learning should be done in a context and for a purpose.

58. The passion of learning is not something you have to inspire kids to have; it’s something you have to keep from extinguishing.

62. A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to its job.

64. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? -Carol Dweck

66. gaofen dineng

67. gaokao

68. zhuangyyuan

71. zero sum

72. Success should never be artificially scarce for an arbitrary few.

73. Competition is for the strong. Public Education is for everyone. See the problem?

74. Peers become obstacles to your own success

75. We can teach kids about competition without immersing them in it.

77. If we simply reconcile to the status quo and spend all our time getting our children to accomodate themselves to it and play the game, then nothing will change and they will have to do the same with their children. As someone once said, realism corrupts; absolute realism corrupts absolutely. Alfie Kohn

80. The most important attitude that can be formed is that of a desire to go on learning.

81. If we want to make things better for our children, we need to start questioning what we consider to be the obvious.