For over 30 years, Carol Dweck has studied students’ motivation in order to find out what makes motivated students tick and she says: “Here is the most important thing I have learned: The most motivated and resilient students are not the ones who think they have a lot of fixed or innate intelligence. Instead, the most motivated and resilient students are the ones who believe that their abilities can be developed through their effort and learning”.
Read [[http://www.cea-ace.ca/pub.cfm?subsection=edu&page=onl|Dweck’s article]] for more about teaching students about learning.
No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. _ No Contest_ makes a powerful case that “healthy competition” is a contradiction in terms.
Young children don’t need to be rewarded to learn… the desire to learn is natural. …And as nearly every parent of a preschooler or kindergartner will attest, they play with words and numbers and ideas, asking questions ceaselessly, with as truly intrinsic a motivation as can be imagined. As children progress through elementary school, though, their approach to learning becomes increasingly extrinsic. – Alfie Kohn
