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 in competitive, achievement-oriented environments and much rarer when students experience the learning as meaningful and engaging and believe that their teachers care about them. In this episode we consider how systemic features not only increase the likelihood of cheating but are responsible for determining which actions (such as collaborating or consulting reference sources) constitute cheating in the first place.

RESOURCES:

Character Education Inquiry, Studies in the Nature of Character. Volume 1: Studies in Deceit (New York: Macmillan, 1928) — https://tinyurl.com/72jrrnrz

Y. Kanat-Maymon et al., “The Role of Basic Need-Fulfillment in Academic Dishonesty,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 43 (2015) — https://tinyurl.com/yjvxswsy

A note from Alfie Kohn:

If you’ve been enjoying, or at least listening to, the podcast but have put off supporting it with a modest quantity of cash, I am pleased to inform you that it is not too late to do so. It will also not be too late to do so tomorrow, but doing so today would be even better. Microphones, as my late father might have said, do not grow on trees.

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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 really aren’t play at all; how important play is for older students and adults, too; how play isn’t the only alternative to “work” in a school setting; and why we shouldn’t try to justify play on the basis of the skills or dispositions it supposedly helps children to acquire. True play has no goal other than itself, and the chance to enjoy it shouldn’t be conditioned on whether it proves to be useful.

RESOURCES:

https://allianceforchildhood.org/

https://www.naeyc.org/

NIFplay.org

Deborah Meier et al., Playing for Keeps (Teachers College Press, 2010): https://tinyurl.com/2hbamnpt

Vivian Gussin Paley, A Child’s Work (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005): https://tinyurl.com/34yzzscw

David Elkind, The Power of Play (Hachette, 2007): https://tinyurl.com/y94mhxfz

A. Kohn, “Students Don’t ‘Work’ — They Learn,” Education Week, September 3, 1997: https://tinyurl.com/yzzwbkxx

A note from Alfie Kohn:

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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 generalities (“technology has pluses and minuses”) in order to tease out which types, uses, and purposes are constructive and which are a waste of time – or worse. In what he calls our current “age of rising pedagogical authoritarianism,” tech often is put in the service of “managing children, ‘delivering’ instruction, narrowing the curriculum, and turn[ing] kids into question-answering ATMs.” Whereas, Stager insists, computers can and should help students to mess around with possibilities, create thrilling projects, and make sense of the world.

RESOURCES

Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager, Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom (2nd ed.), 2019: https://tinyurl.com/33k48zd8

Gary Stager, Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, 2021: https://tinyurl.com/mpdky2cw

https://constructingmodernknowledge.com/

Alfie Kohn, “The Sneaky Conservatism of Ed Tech,” Education Week, September 27, 2023: https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/tech-conservatism/

A note from Alfie Kohn:

My sincere thanks to the listeners who have taken a minute to click on the DONATE link and helped to cover our production costs, thereby keeping the podcast ad- and paywall-free. If you are not yet one of the listeners who has done this, it’s not too late. It will also not be too late tomorrow, but doing so right now would be even better.

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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 “fonix fetish” when teaching young children. They would require older students to read for a certain length of time — and keep a log to prove they complied. They would assign books rather than letting kids choose, test them on the content, and offer rewards for reading. These and other traditional practices are extremely effective…at leading kids to regard reading as an activity to be endured rather than enjoyed.

RESOURCES:

Jessica K. Bone et al., “The Decline in Reading for Pleasure Over 20 Years…,” iScience, 2025: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12496190/

Teresa Cremin, “Reading for Pleasure,” Language and Education, 2024: https://tinyurl.com/376jcra8

Katherine Marsh, “Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love with Reading,” The Atlantic, March 2023: https://tinyurl.com/mrxyfdpd

Alfie Kohn, “A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs,” excerpt from Punished by Rewards (1993/2018): https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/reading-incentives/

For a list of sources debunking claims of the “Science of Reading” campaign about phonics instruction, see note 11 of A. Kohn, “The Siren Song of ‘Evidence-Based Instruction,” 2024: https://tinyurl.com/24nyam6y.

Seth A. Parsons & Joy Dangora Erickson, “Where Is Motivation in the Science of Reading?“, Phi Delta Kappan, 2024: https://tinyurl.com/mus7vn5p

Michael Becker et al., “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Reading Motivation as Predictors of Reading Literacy,” J of Educational Psych, 2010: https://tinyurl.com/3z34ctdd

Linda M. Pavonetti et al., “Accelerated Reader: What Are the Lasting Effects…?”, J of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2002/2003: https://tinyurl.com/yj8dfnwb

Barbara A. Marinak & Linda B. Gambrell, “Intrinsic Motivation and Rewards,” Literacy Research & Instruction, 2008: https://tinyurl.com/2yc3zrjp

A note from Alfie Kohn:

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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 two-part episode digs deeply into strategies for supporting student autonomy and then explores some of the structural and psychological reasons why some teachers are reluctant to move in this direction. It’s tough to give up control, but that’s when the learning really starts.

RESOURCES:

Daphne Blunt Bugental et al., “Who’s the Boss?”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72 (1997): 1297-1309

Child Development Project, Ways We Want Our Class to Be: Class Meetings That Build Commitment to Kindness and Learning (Developmental Studies Center, 1996) [https://tinyurl.com/4zkptxec]

A note from Alfie Kohn:

My sincere thanks to the listeners who have taken a minute to click on the DONATE link (or to visit coff.ee/kohnszone) and helped to cover our production costs, thereby keeping the podcast ad- and paywall-free. If you are not yet one of the listeners who has done this, it’s not too late. It will also not be too late tomorrow, but doing so right now would be even better.

Also, if you enjoy the podcast, please tell other people about it. And if you have feedback about an episode you’ve just listened to, send it to https://www.alfiekohn.org/contact-us/.

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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 supporting their autonomy? In this, the first of a two-part episode, stories and studies illustrate the benefits of giving students a real voice about what and how they learn, how problems are solved, and even how the classroom is arranged and decorated. What’s more, many such decisions are best made collectively (and not just through voting) because autonomy + community = democracy.

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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 research (some of it her own) to probe the nature of curiosity — that remarkable desire we have to resolve discrepancies between what we encounter and what we expected. Curiosity can feed on itself, generating new and subtler questions, yet classrooms often fail to support this process — and indeed may actively discourage it. The more densely packed the curriculum, and the more structured (and goal-oriented) the school day is, Engel argues, the less chance kids have to wonder and explore. She offers suggestions for how teachers can encourage students’ curiosity and help them figure out how best to act on it. We also discuss her newest book, which describes her visists to kindergartens across the country: What distinguishes classrooms for young children that are exceptional from those that make a thoughtful observer wince? (Hint: It’s not mostly a function of race, class, or how nice the teacher is.)

RESOURCES:

Susan Engel, The Hungry Mind (Harvard Univ. Press, 2018) [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674984110]

Susan Engel, The Intellectual Lives of Children (Harvard Univ. Press, 2022) [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674278646]

Susan Engel, The End of the Rainbow (New Press, 2015) [https://thenewpress.org/books/the-end-of-the-rainbow/]

Susan Engel, American Kindergarten (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2026) [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo258923309.html]

Alfie Kohn, “Less and Less Curious,” Education Week, October 2, 2024 [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/curiosity/]

A note from Alfie Kohn:

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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 field of social psychology warns us that we err in underestimating the impact of the environments in which people, including students, find themselves. Alas, this message has become muddled because some classic social psych research is widely misunderstood, including Milgram’s obedience experiments and Mischel’s marshmallow studies. So let’s explore what psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error — and consider how the individualistic underpinnings of our education system (and of our culture more generally) prevent us from taking that insight to heart.

RESOURCES:

Lee Ross, “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 10 (1977): 173-220 [https://tinyurl.com/3d9xdjtd]

Muzafer Sherif et al., The Robbers Cave Experiment (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961/1988) [https://www.weslpress.org/9780819561947/the-robbers-cave-experiment/]

Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (Harper, 1974/2009) [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/obedience-to-authority-stanley-milgram]

Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment: See prisonexp.org.

Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiments: Alfie Kohn, “S’More Misrepresentation of Research: What Waiting for a Second Marshmallow Doesn’t Prove,” Education Week, September 10, 2014 [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/smore-misrepresentation-research/]; Walter Mischel, “From Good Intentions to Willpower,” in The Psychology of Action, ed. P. M. Gollwitzer and J. A. Bargh (Guilford, 1996); Mischel et al., “Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972): 204-18.

Alfie Kohn, “How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education,” Phi Delta Kappan, February 1997 [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/teach-values/]

Ruth Butler, “What Young People Want to Know When: Effects of Mastery and Ability Goals on Interest in Different Kinds of Social Comparisons,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62 (1992): 934-43.

Nona M. Flynn and Judith L. Rapoport, “Hyperactivity in Open and Traditional Classroom Environments,” Journal of Special Education 10 (1976): 285-90; Rolf G. Jacob et al., “Formal and Informal Classroom Settings: Effects on Hyperactivity,” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 6 (1978): 47-59.

A note from Alfie Kohn:

My sincere thanks to the listeners who have taken a minute to click on the DONATE link (or to visit coff.ee/kohnszone) and helped to cover our production costs, thereby keeping the podcast ad- and paywall-free. If you are not yet one of the listeners who has done this, it’s not too late. It will also not be too late tomorrow, but doing so right now would be even better.

Also, if you enjoy the podcast, please tell other people about it. And if you have feedback about the episode you’ve just listened to, send it to https://www.alfiekohn.org/contact-us/.

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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 children to complete more academic tasks when they get home from school. (For elementary and middle school students, no controlled studies have found a meaningful benefit to assigning any type or amount of homework.) So why is the practice still so pervasive and widely accepted? Perhaps the answer lies in mistaken beliefs about learning and cynical beliefs about children.

RESOURCES:

Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It (Crown, 2006)

John Buell, Closing the Book on Homework: Enhancing Public Education and Freeing Family Time (Temple University Press, 2004)

Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (Da Capo Press, 2006) (https://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-myth/).  Read chapter 2 (“Does Homework Improve Learning?”) here: https://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-improve-learning/

Alfie Kohn, “Homework: An Unnecessary Evil? Surprising Findings from New Research,” 2012 (https://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/homework-unnecessary-evil-surprising-findings-new-research/)

Etta Kralovec and John Buell, The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning (Beacon Press, 2000)

A note from Alfie Kohn:

My sincere thanks to the listeners who have taken a minute to click on the DONATE link (or to visit coff.ee/kohnszone) and helped to cover our production costs, thereby keeping the podcast ad- and paywall-free. If you are not yet one of those listeners, it’s not too late. It will also not be too late tomorrow, but doing so right now would be even better.

Also, if you enjoy the podcast, please tell other people about it. And if you have feedback about the episode you’ve just listened to, send it to https://www.alfiekohn.org/contact-us/.

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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 be overestimating the capabilities of LLMs but that we seem to be underestimating the essence of education, which is a process, not merely a series of products. Moreover, is it really a math or English teacher’s responsibility to train students in how to use AI? At best, that skill is quite different from learning to reason through a problem, read deeply, or organize one’s thoughts. At worst, AI offers a way for students to avoid doing those things.

RESOURCES:

Research:

Hamsta Bastani et al., “Generative AI Can Harm Learning,” 2024 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4895486)

Nataliya Kosmyna et al., “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” 2025 (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872)

Michael Gerlich, “AI Tools in Society,” 2025 (https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6)

Activism:

https://against-a-i.com/

https://stopgenai.com/

https://openletter.earth/an-open-letter-from-educators-who-refuse-the-call-to-adopt-genai-in-education-cb4aee75

Other critiques:

This episode overlaps with a recent essay by Alfie Kohn (“The Chatbot in the Classroom, the Forklift at the Gym” – https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/ai/), which contains dozens of links to provocative discussions of AI by other writers.

A note from Alfie Kohn:

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