Almost every Rita Pierson quote in circulation comes from one place: her 2013 TED Talks Education appearance, “Every Kid Needs a Champion,” recorded a few weeks before she died. That talk runs under eight minutes and it is the source for the lines below. She was a teacher and administrator for forty years, in a…
Nearly every Reggio Emilia quote in circulation comes from Loris Malaguzzi, the teacher who founded the approach in the villages around Reggio Emilia in northern Italy after the Second World War. Most of what English-speaking educators quote is translated, which matters: the same passage appears in several different English wordings depending on the translator, and…
“Discipline” means two different things in a school, and quotes for one do not work for the other. Self-discipline is the student’s own habit of doing the work when they do not want to. Classroom discipline is the teacher’s management of behavior. Below are quotes sorted into both categories, with sources where a source exists,…
Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), First Things First (1994), Principle-Centered Leadership (1991), and The 8th Habit (2004). Most quotes circulating under his name come from the first of these, and the seven habit titles themselves are the most quoted lines he wrote. Below are the quotes sorted…
Federalist 10 was written by James Madison under the pen name Publius and published on November 22, 1787, in New York’s Daily Advertiser. Its argument is that factions are inevitable in a free society, that removing their causes would require destroying liberty, and that a large republic controls their effects better than a small democracy…
Growth mindset is Carol Dweck’s term for the belief that ability can be developed through effort, strategy, and instruction, as opposed to a fixed mindset that treats ability as a set quantity. The best growth mindset quotes come from Dweck’s own writing, because most of the lines circulating on classroom posters are either misattributed or…
Finals week quotes get used in three places: on a whiteboard or a study room door, in a message to a student who is struggling, and at the top of a syllabus or an email from a teacher. Those are different jobs, so the lines below are grouped by which one they do. Every quote…
Quote format has four parts: quotation marks around the borrowed words, a signal phrase or grammatical lead-in, the exact original wording, and a citation. In MLA and APA, punctuation goes inside the closing quotation mark in American English, and the citation goes after the closing mark but before the sentence period. Quotations over a set…
Quotes about the education system are used in argumentative essays, reform op-eds, policy talks, and teacher-training slides, and almost all of them are critical. The strongest sourced line is Paulo Freire’s description of what he called the banking model: “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the…
Quotes about studying hard go on desks, planners, lock screens, revision timetables, and the whiteboard in the week before exams. The one with an actual paper trail is Edison’s: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” printed in the Idaho Daily Statesman in 1901 and claimed by Edison himself in a 1927 letter,…