Title: Beyond Discipline
Author: Alfie Kohn
Review: Wow
this was different; everything I have read about classroom management has involved
a token economy or some other type of reward and non-reward concept. This book on the other hand discusses how students
can contribute to the classroom and not need constant reinforcement for good
behavior and nothing for bad…or office referrals etc. I loved that it really looks like this could
work…the teacher just has to be willing to give up the illusion of control. Because if you really think about it we never
have control over another unless we hold all the power and as a teacher you
never want to hold all the power, you need to build positive relationships and
as such you cannot be a dictator in anyway.
Letting the students work out their own problems is a great plan, yes it
will take time for them to learn how to do this, but they will need this skill
in the future. Jobs are going to pay you
for the work you do, but it isn't always going to be fun just like school. Learning to learn for learning sake is what
we want kids to do, so letting them drive the class seems reasonable. Constructivism follows this course,
student-centered learning where the teacher is a guide on the side, not the
expert, sage on the stage or the dictator.
It will take work to make a classroom student centered, but happier student’s
means more productive students and that would lead to a more positive environment
where the students would want to be…that is close to learning for learning’s
sake. We want to build strong leaders
for the future, we don’t want ones that need constant positive reinforcements
and constant carrots or they will never be able to think and act for
themselves. Making choices and following
through with those choices make us feel good about ourselves, our work and our
lives. Lets get kids to feel the same way…no
one likes being told what to do…not you and not students.
Published: Published August 1st 2006 by Association for
Supervision & Curriculum Development
ISBN: 9781416604723
Copyright: 2006
Pages: 191
Quick Review: 4 stars (out of 5)
Where I Obtained
the Book: Purchased at Amazon.
Synopsis: What is most remarkable about the assortment
of discipline programs on the market today is the number of fundamental
assumptions they seem to share. Some may advocate the use of carrots rather
than sticks; some may refer to punishments as logical consequences. But
virtually all take for granted that the teacher must be in control of the
classroom, and that what we need are strategies to get students to comply with
the adult s expectations.
Alfie Kohn challenged these widely accepted premises, and with them the
very idea of classroom management, when the original edition of Beyond
Discipline was published in 1996. Since then, his path-breaking book has
invited hundreds of thousands of educators to question the assumption that
problems in the classroom are always the fault of students who don t do what
they re told; instead, it may be necessary to reconsider what it is that they
ve been told to do--or to learn. Kohn shows how a fundamentally cynical view of
children underlies the belief that we must tell them exactly how we expect them
to behave and then offer positive reinforcement when they obey.
Just as memorizing someone else s right answers fails to promote students
intellectual development, so does complying with someone else s expectations
for how to act fail to help students develop socially or morally. Kohn
contrasts the idea of discipline, in which things are done to students to
control their behavior, with an approach in which we work with students to
create caring communities where decisions are made together.
Beyond Discipline has earned the status of an education classic, a vital
alternative to all the traditional manuals that consist of techniques for
imposing control. For this 10th anniversary edition, Kohn adds a new afterword
that expands on the book s central themes and responds to questions from
readers. Packed with stories from real classrooms around the country, seasoned
with humor and grounded in a vision as practical as it is optimistic, Beyond
Discipline shows how students are most likely to flourish in schools that have
moved toward collaborative problem solving--and beyond discipline.
Author
Biography: Alfie Kohn is the author of many other books about education and human
behavior, including Punished by Rewards, The Schools Our Children Deserve, and
Unconditional Parenting. A former teacher, he now works with educators and
parents across the United States and maintains a Web site.
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