If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.

The legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, . . . has called the system by which merit is appraised and rewarded 'the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world' . . . it is simply unfair to the extent that employees are held responsible for what are, in reality, systemic factors that are beyond their control.

Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.

We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered.

How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.

To feel controlled is to lose interest.

The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, 'The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.' If that’s true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it’s true of what we need to teach.