Chris Colley: 0:13

Here we are, another episode Shift Ed podcast coming to you out of shivery cold Montreal, and I have a wonderful guest today. We were having some connection problems but we figured those out and I have Alfie Cohen here, author, lecturer. Amazing research he does around education and looking at our system and looking for better ways and looking for better ways. A very big student of John Dewey and Jean Piaget and I think a lot of their mindsets have informed Alfie's mindset as well. So, alfie, thanks so much for hopping on here and sharing some thoughts with us today.

Alfie Kohn: 0:59

My pleasure.

Chris Colley: 1:02

So I usually like to get started with kind of a rewind into your past. What was your schooling like?

Alfie Kohn: 1:11

where you were growing up Like.

Chris Colley: 1:12

What are your recollections of school as a student, as a kid in school?

Alfie Kohn: 1:18

It was fairly unexceptional. I went to public school in the US, nothing very exciting. Only later did I begin to reflect on the things that, as a child, you take for granted and, unfortunately, many adults take for granted as well All the things about schooling you just think are part of life. That kids are going to be graded and tested, lectured to have nothing to say about the curriculum, going to be punished and rewarded for obedience, going to be memorizing facts rather than doing meaningful thinking, going to be grouped by ability or by age, etc. All of those things that you know. We just think that's the way it is. And gradually I came to realize it's not the way it has to be and got going on looking at pilot projects and extraordinary teachers in schools and what the research suggests and so on. So I'm happy to talk about any of the ideas, but I don't think my own autobiography sheds much light on those ideas or is necessarily relevant to listeners who've had different experiences.

Chris Colley: 2:40

Right, but I mean it sounds very much like the industrial model that we've had in education for you know, for a while now. Yep, that's right, the tipping point as you were coming into your career writing books and observing education, what were some of the really meaningful or powerful moments where your mindset kind of shifted a little bit or started to open up to other ideas about how education could be?

Alfie Kohn: 3:20

I wrote my first book some time ago about the destructive effects of competition in all areas of life, not only at school but also at home, at work and at play, and started thinking about and learning about cooperative learning as an alternative in a school setting, realizing that students don't have to be separated from each other and told that helping is the same as cheating or worse, set against each other in a contest so that my success comes only at the price of your failure. And then I wrote another book about altruism and empathy and once again started to think about the educational implications. Once again started to think about the educational implications how can we use schools to help kids become more caring and generous people and found great examples of programs that were doing that, as well as relevant research, and went on to think about the destructive effects of not only competition but any kind of reward that says do this and you'll get that. And once again, I'm interested in how these ideas play out in different arenas in our society. But found myself drawn increasingly to thinking about schooling in particular, and by then I'd had some experience as a teacher too. But only after that did I pull from these other bases of research and theory, to think about how schooling can be more student-centered, more meaningful and so on, and found that the research in fact suggests that what's sometimes called progressive or alternative or constructivist ways of teaching and learning aren't just a lot more pleasant, but are a hell of a lot more effective, particularly at more meaningful goals particularly at more meaningful goals.

Alfie Kohn: 5:27

And so I started writing books about education in particular and inviting teachers and parents and others to reflect not only on methods but on our objectives. What are we looking for here? And the more ambitious your educational objective, the worse the status quo fares. In other words, if all you care about is having kids sit quietly and cram some forgettable facts into short-term memory, then you know maybe we're not doing so bad. But if we want kids to be critical thinkers and lifelong learners and decent, caring, compassionate human beings, then the status quo is an abysmal failure. And so that's why I always begin my lectures and workshops for teachers and also for parents, by asking the question what are your long-term goals for kids? And I get the same kind of answers wherever I go. And then what I do for a living, basically, is to say you say you want this, so why are you doing that? Because here's the research showing that that doesn't get you this.

Chris Colley: 6:44

Interesting that that doesn't get you this Interesting. Yeah, I mean I love to. I read your Punished by Rewards and I just felt that that it opened so many thoughts and different perspectives to look at and it kind of was informed also from your other book, the Brighter Side of the Human Nature. Humans are not naturally selfish. Do you think that that has changed over time? Like you wrote this book in 1990, right, the Brighter Side of Human Nature, that's right. Has there been shifts in human nature over since you've written that book? Like I mean, that was you know we're getting on 30 plus years. Does society change quickly? Like, have you noticed any difference about that idea that humans are selfish?

Alfie Kohn: 7:35

Well, the human nature itself isn't going to shift in 30 years or even in 300 years. The question is, how do our ideas about human nature shift? And it's certainly fair to ask, you know, whether I'm as optimistic as I was 30 years ago, or how our culture may or may not have shifted in its views regarding human nature. But I mean, we're at a pretty dark period politically right now and it takes an effort of will to remind ourselves that we have the capacity to do better. You know, right now it's beginning to look not only for what's going on in the US and, to a lesser but still significant extent, in Canada and in many other countries. It's beginning to look as if the idea of democracy was a short-lived experiment in human history, was a short-lived experiment in human history. But I continue to believe that humans have the capacity to be aggressive or peaceful, to be competitive or cooperative, to be selfish or to be pro-social, and we have the capacity to move in a different direction. It doesn't mean it's easy, because there are strong, embedded structural impediments to to doing things that are that are better, but education is as good as any other entry point for trying to help people change their beliefs and the practices that flow from the beliefs. You know, if our schools are set up to create, fundamentally, obedience, if the primary goal in a classroom that you visit appears to be to get the kids to do whatever they're told and follow rules they had no part in helping to create, then that's a message kids take with them as citizens they are.

Alfie Kohn: 9:55

That's why, you know, you mentioned Dewey before. He was interested in democracy as something far wider and richer than just, you know, voting every couple of years. What does it mean to be part of an autonomous community where people have something to say about what happens to them every day at work or at school? And so what a great opportunity to redesign schools so that kids have an active role in deciding how they're going to learn and what they're going to learn, and so on. You know kids learn to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions. So, then, the challenge for educators is how do we create schools with kids, not just for them, to help them become thoughtful decision makers?

Chris Colley: 11:02

And have you seen, like I mean through your research and exploration of education have you seen schools that, or examples where that happens, where the school is created with students and their opinions are cherished and where it's more of a give and take between student and teacher?

Alfie Kohn: 11:25

Oh, yes, I write about those examples in my books and articles and blog posts.

Alfie Kohn: 11:33

In one book I wrote the Schools Our Children Deserve the Schools Our Children Deserve. It's filled not only with research but also with samples of interdisciplinary, project-based, student-designed learning at all different age levels. And I did another book just for teachers, called Beyond Discipline, where I look at the non-academic aspects of schooling, the social, moral, behavioral issues, and I drew from amazing teachers I watched all over the place, not only from research, to talk about what it means to create a caring, democratic community in place of traditional classroom management and discipline, a place where kids are being helped to be good people, not just good learners, and it's done by having an environment that's about working with kids instead of doing things to them. So, yes, if this is not stuff you know that I think up just sitting at my desk in a vacuum or extrapolate from. You know, reading theoretical works. The best research on this is corroborated by the best practice that really is out there but remains a minority report, so to speak remains a minority report, so to speak.

Chris Colley: 13:03

Great, great, and I agree with you. I mean, it seems too that having that more student-centered, progressive look on education gets sidestepped because of all these structures that we have in place and also a feeling that educators feel kind of constrained with, you know, large classrooms and they have to teach the test, and you know funding for education we'll say in Canada, is limited as well. Right, so it's a struggle for teachers. With that in mind, how do you support teacher growth? But within those constraints, like, how do they, how can they move beyond thinking about, well, I have to teach you to test and I have, like all these, you know, structural gears that we have within the educational system, how can teachers start to move beyond that where it's not an excuse to say, well, I can't look at progressive or student-centered because I have all of these requirements? How does that conversation start, alfie?

Alfie Kohn: 14:07

It starts by distinguishing between short-term and long-term kinds of change, and I think we have to engage in both simultaneously. Simultaneously. The short-term question is, given the constraints that you've mentioned of having a top-down standardized curriculum and often with exams that students have to write and be prepared for, how can I minimize the damage of that in my own classroom? How can I? Nothing about that structure prevents me from doing more asking than telling, and even in the worst class school systems I have found teachers who give kids an enormous amount of discretion to really thoughtful lessons, while managing to also prepare them for the damn test. They realize that they don't have to do punishments and rewards. They don't have to assign homework so that kids work a second shift after they get home from a full day in school, which has no benefits, especially below high school, according to the best research. They can do authentic assessment to see how things are going and never give a test and, above all, never use a mark, never put a letter or number on anything a child has done, which research shows has three effects when you grade children. First, it makes kids a lot less excited about learning. Second, it makes them kids prefer the easiest possible task, not because they're lazy, but because they're rational. You know, duh? Of course I'm not going to want to challenge myself. If the goal in here is to get an A or a 100 or whatever, that I'm going to do the easiest thing because it's not a learning classroom, it's a grade-oriented classroom. And the third effect is that kids tend to think in a shallower, more superficial way compared to students learning the identical material with no grades at all. So all of those things ungrading classrooms, getting rid of the many traditional features can be done to a meaningful extent even in the same bad system we're in. In the short term you minimize the damage but at the same time just have to put up with these are political decisions and they're bad ones. And just as we organize and mobilize to make other kinds of social change, so we have to organize and mobilize to challenge these things. So we have to organize and mobilize to challenge these things.

Alfie Kohn: 17:30

And I offer examples in my books of people who have boycotted the tests, refused to take them. If they're know, a member of Parliament who knows less about learning than we do has imposed on us professional development in both the US and Canada. And there's two things I've noticed. I've spoken in all ten provinces in Canada as well as one territory, and I'll give you two examples of two generalizations. The first is that in most Canadian provinces the teachers, through their unions, decide on who to bring in for professional development workshops, so the teachers themselves can make the decision of how we want to learn better, to be better at our craft. That's very unusual in the US where usually it's administrators who decide what the teachers have to sit through. That's a point in Canada's favor.

Alfie Kohn: 18:29

But the second generalization is that even in Canadian provinces and districts where teachers are very unhappy about the testing that the students have to do and that the teachers have to teach to, there is very little critical reaction to, very little critical thought about and pushback on how standardized and regimented the curriculums are.

Alfie Kohn: 18:52

This is true even in the provinces where there's very little in the way of standardized testing, especially for the youngest kids in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, at least for a while.

Alfie Kohn: 19:08

But the idea that here comes a curriculum so that if you're teaching grade four you know you're going to be doing rocks and minerals this year, regardless of whether the kids have any interest in it or background in it or whatever, and you cannot have a student-centered classroom if you have a standardized curriculum that you're required to teach. The teacher has very little meaningful autonomy as a professional educator if every grade four classroom in the province has to be learning the same damn thing regardless. So in other words, it doesn't matter who your kids are this year and how they may differ from the kids you had last year, you have to be teaching the same damn thing. And the amazing thing about that is it's not only a fatal obstacle to the best kind of teaching. The most amazing thing to me is that Canadian teachers don't even seem to realize with some happy exceptions how awful this is and how they ought to be doing everything possible to change this standardization.

Chris Colley: 20:22

Yeah, I totally agree. I've been doing work with some pre-service teachers as well and I'm amazed how they teach the way they were taught right, and I mean, I guess that's how the cycle just keeps going. Is that when you're becoming a teacher, you go to your closest reference of teaching, which is typically the traditional stand and deliver where kids are quiet, and you are the deliverer of knowledge, I guess, or content. I should say I love that idea. What would you give as advice for teachers where they're listening to this and they're saying yes, yes, yes, and then they're faced with.

Chris Colley: 21:04

You know again the curriculum. What are some small little steps that they could tweak to open the doors up a little bit more on student voice and student centered learning? You know more. You know having kids solve problems within the class, develop skills which we tend to overlook as well. You know all the soft skills that kids are going to desperately need in the future are. Where does the journey kind of start, alfie, if you could offer a few little tidbits from your experience where teachers tend to get started to start making a little bit more of a shift towards giving back the learning to the kids.

Alfie Kohn: 21:44

I would start with the kids' questions about themselves and the world. In fact, there's an approach called curriculum integration, created by an American educator named James Bean, b-e-a-n-e into older elementary and even high school, where you basically have kids think about the questions they have about themselves and about the world in stages and then, in small groups, look for common denominators among their questions and then bring everyone in the classroom together to share their group's common questions about self and world, their group's common questions about self and world, and figure out if there are overlaps and then create an interdisciplinary curriculum for the whole year that's fundamentally based on those questions. Now, if you've got certain areas you're forced to cover, I would look after that to try to find ways in which you start with the kids and what they want to know. And if they're talking about what's happening in current events, if they're talking about wildfires that are happening and they're scared about climate change, that can become not only a science curriculum but a social studies curriculum, a literature curriculum, a mathematics curriculum that can take you for months with kids who are actively engaged, you know. Then you look at the curriculum you were handed and where you've got to cover this and you figure out some way to say, oh yeah, we covered that too.

Alfie Kohn: 23:58

But you don't start with the top-down stuff. You start with the student's interests and then, when there's questions about how much longer we should spend on this question or which book we should read, whether we should do this in our small groups or as a whole class, how we can assess this at the end of the week to make sure that people don't have questions or gaps in their understanding, all of those decisions about how to proceed with it are made with the kids in class meetings. All of that can be done even before we make the structural changes that would make such teaching easier, but it's still to a large extent, possible, even in the status quo. Large extent possible even in the status quo and beyond that. You know I draw from a huge range of experts, of teachers and researchers, and I offer citations in all my books, so that if you're primarily focused on how am I going to help little kids learn arithmetic, well, now you turn to the writings of Constance Camus, who is without peer and helping to help make sure that kids construct meaning around mathematical ideas when they're six years old, instead of merely memorizing the approved technique for borrowing from the 10th place.

Alfie Kohn: 25:34

If you're interested in ways of teaching history in high school, I can point you to experts who have focused on what it means to help kids not just memorize dates and events one after another and spit them back, but learn how to think like historians. And so it goes for each discipline, for combining disciplines and for each age. So it's about it starts with the teacher's commitment that says learning is something you do with kids, not just create for them or make them do. And it starts with an understanding that learning is about being able to understand ideas from the inside out, not merely memorizing facts or practicing skills in isolation.

Chris Colley: 26:31

Fascinating. Those are some amazing suggestions and I think listeners could start implementing those small things pretty easily and I can see a shift that could come about pretty quickly. Once you get the kids interested and motivated and listening to their interests, I think you get that engagement which would propel the learning forward, which is just love it.

Alfie Kohn: 26:57

It's much more exciting for the teacher, but it's also unsettling for teachers who are used to being the kings or queens of their classroom.

Alfie Kohn: 27:05

So, you have to be willing to give up some control, you have to be willing to make sure that a classroom is more like a jazz improvisation than like a solo performance. But the other thing, the last thing maybe, to finish up on here, is that it's ideal if you don't have to try to do this all by yourself, if you can find other teachers to do it with, to learn from and to build and to challenge authorities to remember to do that long-term change, to facilitate this kind of learning, rather than to have to constantly be, you know, rowing against the current. You know change is easier to make, morale is easier to build when you're not all by yourself.

Chris Colley: 27:57

Absolutely so cool. Well, I want to thank you. This has been just a real treat. Your words and your books, you've made us all smarter today, Alfie, so thank you for that, oh.

Alfie Kohn: 28:09

I appreciate your interest.

Chris Colley: 28:11

Oh, it's so fascinating. I wish we had much more time, but maybe you'll come and join me again down the road for a continuation.

Alfie Kohn: 28:20

Okay, thanks very much and invite folks who want to know more about this to have a look at the resources on my website, which is just my name alphicone K-O-H-N dot org.

Chris Colley: 28:33

Perfect, We'll do. I'll put it in the descriptor of the cast so that people have access to it easily. And thanks again. This has been really wonderful and I wish you a great day.

Alfie Kohn: 28:43

Thank you, same to you, bye, thank you.