The Work Of Alfie Kohn
August 15, 2026 Teaching Kindness How can schools help children to become not only good learners but also good people? What s involved in cultivating a genuine concern about others , an enduring commitment to helping and caring? Here we consider several strategies, which require us to look beyond behaviors and think about motives : the care we express for students , the prosocial examples we set,…
August 1, 2026 The Pseudoscience of Reading What the real science of reading shows is that there isn t a single method for learning how to read that s ideal for all children. Moreover, reading is not just about letter-sound relationships; it s about making meaning reading (and talking about) real books for real reasons. In an eye-opening conversation, literacy expert Catherine Compton-Lilly helps…
July 15, 2026 The Remarkable Benefits of Diversity Even if you aren t ideologically opposed to segregation in schools, research shows that it doesn t make sense for practical reasons and that goes not only for segregation by race but also segregation by gender, ability, or age. What generally proves beneficial, from preschool to college, are heterogeneous environments diverse schools and, equally…
July 1, 2026 Raising Reflective Rebels We re faced with a silent epidemic of obedience, a pervasive failure to become outraged by outrageous things. Adults whose highest accolade for a child is well-behaved often themselves suffer from a crisis of moral courage. This episode offers practical suggestions for teachers and parents who want to help kids acquire not only the capacity but the…
June 15, 2026 Fun Without Winning or Losing We have been raised and, in turn, raise our children to take on faith that recreation requires competition, that half the people playing a game must try to defeat the other half. (They cooperate only with their teammates, and only in order to triumph over the other team.) In a true cooperative game, by contrast, everyone on the field or gathered around a…
June 1, 2026 PROGRESSIVE HIGH SCHOOL IS NOT AN OXYMORON In theory, the fact that all but a handful of states have eliminated do-or-die exit exams allows high schools to finally do right by teenagers, to help them become engaged intellectuals and caring people. A leading theorist and practitioner of secondary education author, professor, and long-time Midwestern principal George Wood examines the…
May 15, 2026 Grade Inflation Is Not the Problem When you look at student transcripts (rather than at self-reports), it s less clear that average grades are rising over time. And even if some grades are higher, that doesn t mean they re inflated (i.e., undeserved). But many conservative critics don t seem troubled by their inability to prove those claims; they re indignant whenever a lot of kids…
May 1, 2026 Beneath the What and the How Is the Why In the absence of an affirmative definition of mental health, psychology doesn t become value-free; its values and the goals of therapy are just driven underground. Similarly, if we don t reflect on the purpose of education, schooling by default is oriented just to collecting a credential. The point of this episode is not to recommend one…
April 15, 2026 The Best Classroom Discussions, Hands Down In traditional classrooms, students may contribute to a discussion only by raising their hands and waiting for the teacher to call on them. In even more controlling environments, students must contribute when the teacher calls on them, even if they d rather not. The latter practice, cold calling, puts kids on the spot and forces them to…
April 1, 2026 The Assault on Public Education: A Conversation with Jennifer Berkshire Public schools, says Jennifer Berkshire, are the places where we start to solve problems together and from which no child can be excluded even if she has special needs or two moms. Public education is really the foundation of a pluralistic secular democracy, which is precisely why it has long been the target of…
March 15, 2026 Friendly Excursions into Disequilibrium Enforced harmony is counterproductive. Pushing students (or employees) to come to agreement prematurely tends to undermine learning (or produce bad decisions). Sometimes that s motivated by a desire to avoid conflict. But conflict handled carefully is not only tolerable; it s valuable. What s problematic is debate disagreement where the point…
March 1, 2026 Who s Cheating Whom? We re often warned about an epidemic of academic cheating and urged to do more to deter and punish the devious culprits. But we ve had a century of research showing that the frequency of cheating is predicted not by the compromised morality of individual students but by the policies, priorities, and practices of schools. Specifically, cheating is far more common…
FREETHOUGHT TODAY January-February 2026 Spiritual but Not Religious ? Are You Sure? By Alfie Kohn Have you ever come across someone who qualifies her opinions about gender-related issues by assuring her listener that she s not a feminist or anything ? That comment wouldn t be surprising coming from denizens of the Bible Belt or the MAGAverse who are all in for women s subservience ... Read More
February 15, 2026 The Whole Point Is That There s No Point Early-childhood educators remind us how vital it is for kids to have plentiful opportunities to engage in free play which, sadly, is often denied to them as academic pressures are imposed too early and too intensely. But let s consider some perspectives on play that are less obvious: how the word is sometimes applied to activities that…
February 1, 2026 Beyond Electronic Flashcards : A Conversation with Gary Stager Computers in classrooms may have the potential to radically enrich and democratize student learning, but the reality of ed tech typically looks very different. This extended episode of Kohn s Zone features a stimulating conversation with Gary Stager, one of our foremost experts on this topic. He takes us beyond banal…
January 15, 2026 How to Kill Kids Interest in Reading Surveys reveal that fewer children and adults are reading for pleasure. This might be due partly to social media, but certain classroom strategies and school policies likely play a role. In this episode we come at the issue backwards: What would teachers do if their goal was to extinguish kids enthusiasm about books? Well, they would adopt a…
January 1, 2026 Who Gets to Decide? Part 2 Intellectually vibrant classrooms are distinguished by teachers who do a lot more asking than telling. Their motto when confronting challenges or planning lessons is Bring the kids in on it! Regular class meetings offer a significant role for students to reflect on how we want our class to be (rather than focusing on specific rules). This second of a…
December 15, 2025 Who Gets to Decide? Part 1 An impressive body of research shows that people of all ages including students in classrooms are happier, healthier, and more productive when they have some say about what they re doing. Indeed, the way children learn to make good decisions is by making decisions. Why, then, are so many classrooms more focused on eliciting their compliance than…
December 1, 2025 The Curious Case of the Incurious Children A Conversation with Susan Engel Everyone agrees that it s good to be curious, but that doesn t mean schools are committed to fostering children s curiosity. This extended episode of Kohn s Zone features a provocative conversation with early-childhood expert Susan Engel of Williams College, who draws on a deep background of theory and…
November 15, 2025 It s Not Just You The most popular initiatives in education tend to be strategies for fixing the kids. A focus on the deficits of individual students, rather than a critical analysis of systemic issues, is the common denominator of academic remediation, behavior management programs, and efforts to equip children with more self-regulation, grit, or a growth mindset. Yet the entire…
November 1, 2025 Making Kids Work a Second Shift Too often the debate over homework is restricted to its quantity or, at best, its quality. But such discussions take for granted the need for some homework, as if it were impossible to question that premise. It may come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that research generally fails to support the value of, let alone the need for, requiring…
October 27, 2025 Seeing What Isn t Out There A Meditation on Various Forms of Projection By Alfie Kohn We re all familiar with the way some people attribute their own problematic traits or feelings to others. Projection, as described by Freud and his followers, was originally conceived as a defense mechanism that operated unconsciously. Think of the perpetually angry person who ... Read More
October 15, 2025 A.I., as in Anti-Intellectual People who express concern about the use of AI in schools often focus on how it allows students to get away with something (by using OpenAI to write their essays). But shouldn t we be talking more about its potential effects on teaching and learning than whether it will impede our ability to evaluate students? The problem is not just that we seem to…
October 1, 2025 Death by Civics A Conversation with Joel Westheimer About the Role of Education in Democratic Life Suppose you wanted young people to develop a commitment to democracy, particularly at a time when it s under assault. How would you do that? Not by creating a school culture in which following the rules is valued more than critical thinking. And not by offering conventional civics…
EDUCATION WEEK September 22, 2025 The Chatbot in the Classroom, the Forklift at the Gym By Alfie Kohn [This is a significantly expanded version of the published article, which was given a different title. To listen to an episode of the podcast Kohn s Zone based on this article, click here.] ... Read More
September 15, 2025 The Failure of Failure The notion that kids today have it too easy and would benefit from more experiences with failure is no longer a surprising, contrarian claim; it has become the conventional wisdom. But it s dead wrong on two levels: Most children deal with frustration and failure quite a lot, and those experiences tend not to be beneficial, according to research. Either…
September 1, 2025 Bad Signs The posters and signs adorning school walls speak volumes about the people who put them there, revealing a surprising amount about their views of children, their assumptions about learning, and even their beliefs about human nature. There s the enforced positivity of slogans that basically tell students: Have a nice day .or else, the individualistic worldview of ...…
August 25, 2025 Education for What? By Alfie Kohn This article is the basis for an episode of the podcast Kohn s Zone whose title is Beneath the What and the How Is the Why. To listen, click here. To talk about curriculum (what to teach) or pedagogy (how to teach) is to bump up against the question of why to ... Read More
August 15, 2025 Confusing Harder with Better What do the following have in common? a) parents who don t seem particularly concerned about whether what their kids are doing in school is engaging or meaningful, but are quick to complain if their assignments aren t sufficiently challenging b) people who assume that Advanced Placement classes must be the best that a high school has to offer just…
August 1, 2025 Number Sense and Nonsense A Conversation with Jo Boaler About Learning Math(s) Question: Why do so many people write off math as uninteresting if not downright unpleasant, and as something they just don t have a knack for? Answer: Years of traditional instruction with textbooks and worksheets and quizzes, memorization of math facts and algorithms, direct instruction of the approved…
July 15, 2025 Skip the Sugarcoating If your company is offering unappealing food, you ll be tempted to add artificial sweetener. And if your schools are offering unengaging lessons (which students had no role in creating), you ll be tempted to use some kind of gimmick to make them seem less dreary. This episode considers how, long before gamification, John Dewey hit on the metaphor of sugarcoating…
July 1, 2025 Little Ed Koches Grades and tests get in the way of learning for multiple reasons, but this episode digs deeper to explore how any practices that lead students to focus on how well they re doing in school as opposed to what they re doing are bad news. Policy makers who trumpet their demands for higher standards, rigor, and raising the bar may not realize that this focus on achievement…
July 1, 2025 The Back-to-School-Night Speech We d Like to Hear This introductory episode offers an overview of education issues that will be discussed on the podcast a sort of a Cliff s Notes to what distinguishes traditional from progressive education. It takes the form of a (fictitious) principal s remarks to parents delivered one evening in a school auditorium. The premise was inspired by a…
February 24, 2025 The * %$!#! Baseball Study Why Are Fans of Fact-Focused Teaching Still Citing a Small, Unconvincing Experiment from the 80s? By Alfie Kohn Traditional education has more often been practiced by default than explicitly defended. For the last few years, however, we have witnessed a defensive, defiant embrace of instructional strategies that turn back the clock, notably a ... Read…
January 27, 2025 Heterogenius Why and How to Stop Dividing People into Us and Them By Alfie Kohn This essay is the basis for an episode of the podcast Kohn s Zone titled The Remarkable Benefits of Diversity. To listen, click here. How can we use each other s differences in our common battles for a livable future? Audre Lorde ... Read More
EDUCATION WEEK October 2, 2024 Less and Less Curious By Alfie Kohn When Susan Engel, a developmental psychologist and teacher-educator at Williams College, decided to spend a few months observing suburban elementary schools, she had a specific goal in mind: to study variations in rates of children s curiosity. Which kids asked lots of questions? Which classrooms tended to encourage that? ... Read…
May 23, 2024 The Siren Song of Evidence-Based Instruction By Alfie Kohn I m geeky enough to get a little excited each time a psychology or education journal lands in my mailbox.1 Indeed, I ve spent a fair portion of my life sorting through, critically analyzing, and writing about social science research. Even my books that are intended for general readers contain, ... Read More
March 4, 2024 Cognitive Load Theory An Unpersuasive Attempt to Justify Direct Instruction By Alfie Kohn [For a half-hour interview and discussion with Kohn about this essay, see this video.] A remarkable body of research over many years has demonstrated that the sort of teaching in which students are provided with answers or shown the correct way to do something ... Read More
October 25, 2023 Aggressive Nostalgia The Dark Side of Pining for the Good Old Days By Alfie Kohn Time was when parents had their own authority about the rearing of children .There was no back talk and no nonsense .Today we have the child- centered home. In it there is little peace and quiet, and certainly not much respect for, or fear ... Read More
EDUCATION WEEK September 27, 2023 The Sneaky Conservatism of Ed Tech By Alfie Kohn Have you ever noticed that people in positions of power who earnestly exhort us to “think outside the box” are likely to resist any effort to change the box itself? Take the folks in Silicon Valley. Their basic mission, as technology critic Evgeny Morozov argued recently, ... Read More
April 20, 2023 Pay Attention, Class: Here Come More Facts for You to Forget By Alfie Kohn A.P. European History was the best-reviewed class in my old high school. The teacher was a kindly man with an admirable devotion to his subject. Despite his skills, however, and despite the fact that I received an A, all that remained in my ... Read More
March 13, 2023 The Caring Subversion of Nel Noddings: An Appreciation By Alfie Kohn My undergraduate mentor had a life-changing impact, both as a teacher and a human being, on innumerable students he taught over the course of nearly three decades.1 So on his 95th birthday about a hundred of us took a full day to tell him so. We ... Read More
February 28, 2023 How to Prevent Social Change: A Handy Guide for Educators and Parents By Alfie Kohn If you re the sort of person who prefers to perpetuate rather than challenge the status quo or maybe just a fan of inequity I have good news for you. Certain ways of raising and teaching children are actually much more ... Read More
December 23, 2022 The Times Deeply Regrets These Errors By Alfie Kohn Due to an editing error, an obituary on Saturday incorrectly described Thomas R. McKeown as having lived in Longfield, NJ. He actually lived in East Longfield. Additionally, Mr. McKeown has not yet died. An account in Sunday s Vows section of Elizabeth Tipsy Wagglesworth s wedding to Maria ... Read More
November 3, 2022 Eduspeak Reconsidered When, Why, and to Whom Is Educational Jargon Annoying? By Alfie Kohn Over the years I ve heard a lot of people complain sometimes good-naturedly, sometimes with remarkable venom about our field s use of jargon. Eventually I began to wonder why eduspeak or edspeak (or, less charitably, edu-babble ) vexes people so, and to what ... Read More
September 30, 2022 Is It Enough for Learners to Be Engaged ? By Alfie Kohn To enhance achievement, one must first learn how to engage students. That challenge by Fred Newmann, emeritus professor of education at the University of Wisconsin,1 could serve as the motto for an entire movement by thoughtful theorists, researchers, and practitioners in the field. And it makes ... Read More
EDUCATION WEEK September 21, 2022 Why Feedback Often Doesn t Help By Alfie Kohn [This is an expanded version of the published article, which was given a different title.] A lot of people make a living by offering advice about how teachers should give feedback to students or how administrators should give feedback to teachers. Unfortunately, a body of compelling ... Read More
May 16, 2022 When the Myth of Progress Unravels By Alfie Kohn The arc of history is long, but it bends toward catastrophic annihilation. Barbara Ehrenreich The fact that five religious Supreme Court justices have eliminated women s right to terminate a pregnancy a protection representing a half-century of progress toward a more equal society has ... Read More
April 29, 2022 Last Time, the Religious Right Told Us Not Only What We Can Teach but How to Teach It By Alfie Kohn Christian conservatives are banning books and censoring school curricula and not for the first time. Materials dealing with sexuality and sexual orientation have always been popular targets for them; indeed, researchers have found that literally ... Read More
Foreword to Cooperative Games 2022 Cooperative Games Discovering How Much Fun Competition Isn t By Alfie Kohn [This essay is adapted from the Foreword to Cooperative Games in Education by Suzanne Lyons (Teachers College Press, 2022). It s also the basis for an episode of the podcast Kohn s Zone called Fun Without Winning or Losing. To listen, click here.] The reassuring ... Read More