People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices

In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.

Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.

Sometimes we have to put our foot down, ... but before we deliberately make children unhappy in order to get them to get into the car, or to do their homework or whatever, we need to weigh whether what we're doing to make it happen is worth the possible strain on our relationship with them.

Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe.

Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.

Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.