The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 238
Jennifer Gonzalez, Host
GONZALEZ: I’m recording this just a few days after the 2024 presidential election in the U.S. I can’t think of a time when it’s been more glaringly obvious that as a country, we have some very big differences in opinions, a time when it’s felt more uncomfortable, more painful at times to know we are living side by side with people who see the world so differently from us. But this is where we are right now, and we can either succumb to our current divide and let it get bigger and bigger, or keep trying to figure out how to close it.
When I originally planned this episode, I had no intention of making it a response to the election. It’s a total coincidence that the date I had it scheduled for just happened to fall on November 10, because the topic is how we can make our classrooms places where we have more productive conversations with each other, where we develop the habit of seeking out different perspectives and inviting each other into our conversations. And that just happens to be something we really need right now. Hear me when I say it’s not the only thing we need, but we need it.
My guest is Peter Johnston, author of the book, Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning. The book, which he originally wrote in 2004, shows teachers how the words we say to our students can significantly change the way they respond to us, how they approach their work, how they talk to each other, and how they see themselves. In episode 114, “Let’s give our teaching language a makeover,” I actually referenced some of his recommendations. Now, 20 years after its original publication, Johnston has published a revised second edition of the book. So I invited him to join me to look more closely at one of the chapters, where he talks about how the language we use with students can give them the habits and tools to participate thoughtfully in a world where not everyone will agree with you.
He’s written a guest post for Cult of Pedagogy on this topic, but I also want to highlight something he says in our interview that I think really captures the essence of what he’s getting at, something that seems even more relevant now than when we talked last week: “What’s required of living in a democracy is people have to manage to get on, people have to recognize difference and get on with things in spite of those differences. But actually, because of those differences, they need to actually use those differences to lever both self and society forward. Choice Words really answers the question, ‘What do we expect to hear in an intellectually, socially and emotionally healthy classroom? And what role does language play in that?’ We can think of that as preparation for living in a diverse society. And part of the deal is helping students learn to live with uncertainty and to find uncertainty not something to be fearful of … discrepancies, disjunctures, … things that don’t quite fit together. We want kids to actually take those seriously as opportunities to learn.”
I interviewed Johnston before the election, but I listened to the recording after, and it’s startling to me how much more these words resonate with me now. What you’ll find in this episode is a small collection of sample phrases teachers can say at key teaching moments to get students moving toward those moments of uncertainty thoughtfully, respectfully, and bravely, so we can figure out how, in Johnston’s words, to get on with things.
Before we get started, I’d like to thank The Gilder Lehrman Institute for sponsoring this episode. Are you a K-12 teacher, community college instructor, or education professional looking to advance your career with a master’s degree that fits your busy schedule? The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Gettysburg College have partnered to offer an affordable, fully online, and fully accredited master’s degree program specifically designed for educators like you. Join them this spring and learn from the nation’s most distinguished historians, including Ned Blackhawk, David Blight, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Alan Taylor. With flexible courses available year-round, including 6-week summer options, this program is designed to work around your schedule. Applications for the Gettysburg College–Gilder Lehrman MA in American History are now open. Visit gilderlehrman.org/MA to learn more.
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Now here’s my conversation with Peter Johnston about how teacher language can build a more democratic classroom.
GONZALEZ: Peter, welcome to the podcast.
JOHNSTON: Thanks, Jenn.
GONZALEZ: We are here to talk about your book “Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning.” And you have actually written a second edition of this book. The original was written in 2004. So tell my listeners a little bit about what the original book was about and then why you have made an update to that.
JOHNSTON: Well, the original book came out of a study that — we had a federal grant to study teachers who were being particularly successful. And I, we studied a large number of teachers quite closely, and I became interested in the language that they were using. It was just a case of sometimes they would say, they would say something, and I would think, “That’s not maybe what I would have said.” And why is that interesting, you know. So I started to study the language that they were using, and that really led to the first edition of choice words, which seemed to strike a chord with a lot of teachers. So I was simply explaining why some of the language those teachers used was so important. Well, I continued studying classroom talk over the years working with a group of teachers who had been applying “Choice Words” and related work by folks like Maria Nichols and Katie Wood Ray over a period of about 10 years. We produced a book documenting that work called “Engaging Literate Minds.” So that expanded more my thinking about, about the language and how we could use it in classrooms. So it expanded beyond what I had learned in the original study. At the same time, my colleague Gay Ivey and I studied what happens when eighth grade English language arts teachers decide to focus on getting their students engaged in reading. So where the teachers stop assigning books and offer their students a wide range of engaging young adult books, invited them to read with no strings attached, no book reports and so forth, and encouraged them to talk with each other about the books. They stopped asking comprehension questions and just asked open questions like, “What are you thinking?” Or “catch me up.” And it radically changed classroom conversations, and we documented the astonishing effects on the students. I mean they were really remarkable cascade of effects on the students and on the teachers and their teaching. Because as students changed, teachers changed and the more the teachers could see what was possible. They only set out to get the students engaged. But once they saw what was possible once they did that, then more things became possible for them. It’s like once you change teaching a bit, it’s like going into a room in a house and now you can see into another room that you couldn’t see before. So they, their aspirations changed. So we documented that work in our book, came out last year called “Teens Choosing to Read.” The least interesting outcome was that more students, particularly minorities, boys and economically disadvantaged students passed the state test. And those who had previously scraped by did better. But much more importantly, I think, way more importantly, was that the students were transformed, you know, individually and collectively. Their sense of self, their moral development, their relationships with peers and family and we followed those students a couple of years into high school, and they remembered those experiences fondly. Well, I should say wistfully because it all went away in high school. But, so even when we interviewed them two and three years later, they could remember the conversations that they had with peers, where they were sitting. They remembered it in technicolor.
GONZALEZ: Wow.
JOHNSTON: And then once they hit high school, it all went away. So while “Choice Words” had held up well for 20 years, those experiences and new research in a number of fields in social psychology, developmental psychology and so forth led me to write the new edition of the book. So that’s sort of the background of, of the new edition.
GONZALEZ: How much would you say is different in the new book from the old one?
JOHNSTON: Well I tried to stay with the, with the, I changed the structure a little, but I tried to change with the, stay with the, the things that teachers really found most useful. And I changed some examples when I had more powerful examples. I added some things about the biases that are built into language.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: And how we might think about those. I emphasized more of the social and emotional consequences of the language that we use in classrooms. And I emphasized a bit more this interest in the kind of topic that we’ll talk about today, which has to do with children learning how to think together and collaborate and so forth.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Well let’s, let’s get into that. Let’s get into that, the topic that we’re drilling down to because the book covers a lot of different impacts that teacher language choices have on kids and their learning. But what we chose to talk about today here is building a democratic learning community within our classrooms and how teachers can shape that, just with the way that they choose to phrase things and how they speak to students. So tell me a little bit more about this idea of a democratic learning community. What does that ideally look like for you?
JOHNSTON: Well, hmm. I used that because I think what’s required of living in a democracy is people have to manage to get on, people have to recognize difference and get on with things in spite of those differences. But actually, because of those differences, they need to actually use those differences to lever both self and society forward. And I think actually the properties that are required there are not so different from properties that are required in other partnerships like marriage and so forth. So, I mean, “Choice Words” really answers the question, you know, what do we expect to hear in an intellectually, socially and emotionally healthy classroom? And, you know, what role does language play in that? But we can think of that as also preparation for living in a society, in a diverse society. So that’s really where I see that coming from. So part of the deal is helping students learn to live with uncertainty and to find uncertainty not something to be fearful of. When students, when people are in a monologic classroom, they learn to be uncomfortable with, with discrepancies, disjunctures, with things that don’t quite fit together. And what we want is kids to actually take, take those seriously as opportunities to learn. So monologic classrooms lean kids towards authoritarian teachers.
GONZALEZ: If you don’t mind, let’s, let’s get a collective definition for what you mean when you say, “monologic classrooms.” I can kind of infer it.
JOHNSTON: Yeah. Monologic classrooms is this, essentially, one voice. The teacher has the knowledge, the knowledge is to be passed onto the students.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
JOHNSTON: And that’s the sort of basic frame.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
JOHNSTON: And so it’s reflected in a, in a pattern of language where the teacher asks a question, to which there’s a right answer that the teacher knows. And students answer that or and get qualifying feedback from the teacher, you know.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: “Yes, right, good, well.” language like that. So that would be a monologic classroom.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
JOHNSTON: A dialogic classroom is where you have multiple perspectives, are respected, valued. And the teacher is one of those voices in the classroom. So yeah, it makes a, it makes a difference. It’s not the exchanges where teachers ask a question, students answer the question, and the teacher evaluates it. It’s not that those are completely out of place in a dialogic classroom. There are times for that when you’re reviewing, you know, when you’re reviewing a, some work that we’ve done together or something like that. Just to get us back to where we, where we know we were, if you like.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: But there’s, the rest of classroom life is different —
GONZALEZ: Okay.
JOHNSTON: — in a dialogic classroom.
GONZALEZ: Okay. So what we’re looking at are some ways that teachers can frame conversations and situations so that it leans more, much more in this direction of things being dialogic where there can be a lot of different viewpoints and there’s this spirit of learning from each other and learning together as opposed to there just being one authority that decrees whether things are right or wrong and that’s it.
JOHNSTON: Yes.
GONZALEZ: Okay. And so what you’ve done, and there’s a companion to this conversation in that we’ve got a post that you’ve written, a blogpost, that is parsing out all of this stuff and giving some concrete examples of things that teachers can say. And this is sort of your main work in “Choice Words” is looking at specific phrasing and the impact that that has. So we’re going to just go through these examples that you’ve given and have you talk about them.
JOHNSTON: Okay. I should say.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
JOHNSTON: Before we start on that, the language itself is one thing, but the reason the language is there is because of what the teachers think they’re doing and who they think they’re doing it with. That is, they say these things because of what they think they’re doing. So for example, I think if you, if you think about what you’re doing as a read aloud, then you do a performance.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: But if you think about reading aloud as an opportunity to think together, you approach it differently.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: So what we think we’re doing changes the language that we use, and the other part is who we think we’re doing it with. So if we think that students are blank slates, we interact with them differently. So we interact with babies and dogs similarly, but not the same. And that’s because we don’t expect dogs to become conversation partners in the long run.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, right.
JOHNSTON: Do you see? So it’s what we think we’re doing and who we think we’re doing it with that makes a difference here.
GONZALEZ: Okay. That’s, that’s, I’m glad you said that because that’s going to, that’s going to help make sure that I ask you the right questions.
JOHNSTON: Well, it’s also the case that a lot of these things are possible in some circumstances but not others. So for example, when children are engaged, we talk to them differently. They talk with us differently. When they’re not engaged but we’re trying to get them to do something, we talk to them differently.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
JOHNSTON: So it really matters. If you’re going to have a conversation, for example, it matters if you find the other person interesting. You can get kids to listen to other people. One way is to make it so that the other people are interesting to them. The other way is listening through vigilance.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
JOHNSTON: Being vigilant to listen to, because I have to listen to, you know, which of course obviously I hope is not happening now. But it’s that, it’s that listening through vigilance is actually, is wearing. It takes energy.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: But listening because you find someone interesting is actually not at all wearing. It’s enlivening.
GONZALEZ: Okay, so how do we reconcile that, because I know that, for example, for a student, are you saying that the teacher should strive to be interesting inherently and that will make the kids more likely to want to listen. And also, what about the kids who find themselves partnered up with other kids that they don’t find interesting?
JOHNSTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: It’s a complicated business, but okay. So let’s say you want to have a dialogue with kids in kindergarten. You want to get dialogic interaction happening. Okay, so you would find, first of all, a topic or a book that they would find compelling. So for example, let’s see, Sharon Creech has a book called “A Fine, Fine School.”
GONZALEZ: Okay.
JOHNSTON: In which the principal thinks it’s such a great school that it would be better if they had school on Saturdays as well. And then Sundays. And then Summer and so forth. And of course the kids get, you know, they can get into that. That’s something that matters to them. So we can, but we can get them to take roles. We can get them to take the principal’s role. We can get them to take the teacher’s role. We can get them to take a parent’s role and so forth.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: And role play those things so that they see that there’s disjuncture here that, how are we going to work this out? How are we going to talk with one another and so forth? So we can do that, or we can find like when I think in San Francisco they banned the plastic toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals and that was in the newspaper, you know. So how do the kids feel about that? Well, that’s a topic that they can find interesting. But it’s with the eighth-grade students, for example, they were reading books that were kind of edgy, the young adult books, that bring up things that are personally relevant, personally meaningful to them but also have moral dilemmas in them.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: Moral dilemmas that require them basically to, they have to, they have to talk to somebody about it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: But if there’s only like two copies of the book, they also have to persuade somebody else to read it.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: Or they have to keep track of who’s read it. So they’ll have those, so those sorts of things make possible conversations that are, they make possible conversations that are not possible when they, when the topic is really, you know, fundamentally uninteresting to them. You know, so.
GONZALEZ: So it’s, it sounds like what you’re saying is that these examples that we’re about to talk about are going to be infinitely more useful if the topic that is being discussed is something that is actually interesting to the kids.
JOHNSTON: Yeah. Absolutely.
GONZALEZ: Versus something that’s got no inherent interest. These may not even work that well because the kids won’t be that engaged.
JOHNSTON: Schooling ought to be about being engaged, you know.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
JOHNSTON: I mean happy, engaged kids are better learners.
GONZALEZ: Yes. So you sort of, the first example, you’ve sort of covered it a little bit already. This idea of calling something a read aloud. There’s a text that we’re going to be reading together. And the phrasing that you are suggesting instead is saying let’s do some thinking together about this book. You’ve talked about this already. Is there anything else you want to add about that?
JOHNSTON: Yeah. No. I just think that reminding the teacher that’s what we’re doing so that the teacher doesn’t fall into, you know, the business of asking comprehension questions and fosters conversations instead amongst the children.
GONZALEZ: Okay, good. So then the second example, since we’ve kind of covered that one, is just the question, what are you thinking? Rather than, you know, and then the prompt that follows after that is, what are you thinking? Talk to your neighbor about it. Versus, versus what?
JOHNSTON: Well, again, comprehension questions, I suppose. I mean the thing is that that second piece of talk to your neighbor about it means that everybody gets to say something.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
JOHNSTON: If you, if you don’t do that, then it’s a case of everybody sticking up their hands and waiting to be called on by the teacher. So two things happen when they turn and talk to each other is they all get to say their piece, but they also get to rehearse what they would say. And so then when you return to the whole group, they’ve actually got something more, more thought out to say.
GONZALEZ: Right, right.
JOHNSTON: So that’s that. And the, the, you know, what are you thinking is such a wide-open question. You can’t be wrong.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: So you can get anxious about, is this the right, is this what she’s thinking?
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. I was going to ask you about that. It is a very open-ended question. Leaves a lot of space for all kinds of interpretations. The other thing that you added in this bit here was a follow-up question later on down the road. What are you thinking now?
JOHNSTON: Yes, well.
GONZALEZ: With its own implication, yeah.
JOHNSTON: Yeah. Well it has the implication that obviously thoughts will change, and we should have kids expect for their thoughts to change, and we should, you know, show them that. You know, when we’ve had a conversation, we can say things like, you know, boy, my thoughts have really changed over this conversation. Has anyone else’s thoughts changed? You know. So we expect that kids start to see the value of having those conversations because their own thoughts change.
GONZALEZ: Right. So the next example is, did you hear what Tim said? And I pulled this one, this is an example just sort of prompting students to react to each other versus it just being like a teacher-directed conversation.
JOHNSTON: Yeah. Well, there is a little prompting there for them to attend to each other as what each other’s contributing. So we say, did you hear what Tim said? And then we say something like, Steve, could you, could you remind us what Tim said? So that they know that we’re not just interested in what they’re thinking. They need to be interested in what the other kids are thinking as well. And then we can capitalize on that.
GONZALEZ: The next example is it’s your job to ask them to explain. And this, what you’re talking about here has to do with not understanding what a peer is saying, or a speaker is saying, and sort of putting the onus back on the student to ask for further explanation.
JOHNSTON: Yeah. Well, even teaching teachers, graduates in graduate school, they’re inclined to, when they, in a class discussion, when they want to say something to the, another person in the class, but they look at me when they’re saying it because we’re so schooled in, in that way of approaching things. You know, I’m at the front of the class.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: So yeah. Kids do that all the time. Talk, you know, and you just turn their attention to if you’ve got something to say to that person, you need to, you know, look at them and say it to them.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. So continually sort of redirecting them gently to, you know, continue to talk to each other and not just to me at the front of the room.
JOHNSTON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
GONZALEZ: This next one is give everyone a chance to say something so you don’t miss different ways of thinking.
JOHNSTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: This is another prompt to students. Well the idea there is that a good sort of information is causal process information that gives, when you do this, this happens. So when you say that, it would be “give everyone a chance to say something.” If you just leave it at that, there’s no motive for it. So you add, so that you don’t miss the different ways of thinking. So it’s, it’s adding the, that’s what makes it a strategy, if you like.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. And it’s funny because adding that kind of takes the, the judgment and the morality out of it. Because I think a lot of times kids are told to take turns or give everybody a voice or whatever, and it’s almost more of this just a moral thing. Like, we need to just make sure that everybody has a chance. But this tweak to that kind of adds almost a different level of value to it that we’re actually, you’re going to gain something also by giving everybody a chance to speak.
JOHNSTON: That’s right. It’s a self-interest motive. Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Which I think sometimes can motivate people more than just be a good person and let other people talk. Yes. Everybody can sort of agree that that’s a good thing.
JOHNSTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: But sometimes it’s not quite as motivating as this more self-interest of you’re going to actually potentially gain something from hearing other points of view here.
JOHNSTON: Yeah, yeah.
GONZALEZ: The next one, and this is also carefully phrased. We have two different points of view. So this is where the teacher is sort of summarizing a conversation that is in progress and stating it very neutrally as we have these various points of view happening. Why phrase it that way?
JOHNSTON: Well, the, we have, first of all the, we have two different points of view, we’re thinking, and he summarizes one of the thoughts and then, or maybe summarizes the other idea. Well, it’s sort of two pieces, several pieces in this. One of them is, bringing forward two conflicting ideas, okay. Because it’s in that disjuncture that learning takes place. This is one of the things that Piaget and Vygotsky taught us that it’s, so you have a theory but then something is discrepant with that theory that forces you to actually pull those, to rethink whatever your thoughts were, your, your initial ideas. And, so that’s one thing, just summarizing those two points to put them into disjuncture for the kids to think about. The second piece is we have two different points of view. We’re thinking so they’re not naming, the teacher’s not naming the students who put those two things forward, because if you put the students’ names with those ideas, then kids are less — and adults — are less likely to critique the ideas because it makes it personal.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: And people become more creative. They generate more ideas and they’re more satisfied with the final product when the ideas are associated, when they’re not associated with particular people. So we want to have criticism of ideas, and so separating those things really matters. And the way it’s stated, you know, we have two different points of view. We’re thinking, that is naming again what we’re doing is we’re thinking together here. And it sort of leans on the collective agency and responsibility of thinking together. So I guess, you know, that’s the, why that one’s important. I mean it’s not always the case that you don’t want to name kids in those things. When kids use a strategy, if we say, like, pushing back. Can anyone push back against this? And someone pushes back, or someone disagrees or whatever. We can say, well, when you did that, that pushing back, we named the strategy.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: And we can put the student’s name with it. So we use anchor charts to have, where kids come up with ideas, of strategies for doing this for ways of talking or, you know, ways of writing and so forth. We have anchor charts that have the thing that the student said as a good idea, a good way of, a good strategy to use. Then we have the student’s name with it. And then we have why it’s important that this is important.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: Yeah. It’s, the student’s name is, kids actually really like having their names on anchor charts to identify them as being the one who had that idea for a strategy. Because a strategy can’t be wrong.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: It’s, so it sounds like, this sort of brings us back to what you were saying earlier that you, you’ve got the words that you say but then your intention of what exactly are you trying to do here. What are you trying to do with these kids? And so it sounds like this example of we have two different points of view is at that moment meant to sort of pull back, kind of neutralize this difference of opinion and make them just sort of like these are the opinions that are sitting in here. As opposed to this kid here said this, and let’s all decide whether we agree or disagree with this one person. Let’s lift the ideas up and just deal with them as ideas.
JOHNSTON: It’s because it’s ours. These are our thoughts.
GONZALEZ: Yes. Yeah.
JOHNSTON: Yeah. And we expect to have sort of multiple thoughts in our own heads, disjunctures. This is a normal thing to happen, both collectively and individually, yeah.
GONZALEZ: You know, we’re days away from a big election.
JOHNSTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: And so there’s a lot of conversations happening right now. So I’m processing a lot of what you’re saying in terms of the impact that it can have when you’re having a conversation with somebody who has different political beliefs and that even saying something like this can kind of take some of the heat out of the conversation and just evaluate the ideas.
JOHNSTON: Yes.
GONZALEZ: You know, a little bit less personally.
JOHNSTON: We do want, yeah, we do want kids, that’s why this is preparation for living in a democracy is that we do want kids to expect to interact with people who have different ideas. And we, we do want them to know how to do that without going wacky.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: And to expect that in the process they can learn something.
GONZALEZ: Yes. So the next example, and by the way I’m using, we’ve got names here that are from the examples that you’ve used, and so these are not, these are not verbatim what teachers should say. But this example says, why don’t you invite Shauna into the conversation?
JOHNSTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: This is a teacher suggesting to a student that they invite another student in. Why is this phrasing important?
JOHNSTON: Well this is actually, I mean, I think the whole example I used here is kind of important. So this is a situation where my colleague Kathy Champeau is working with a group of students and Shauna was a quiet student in special education who also would spend part of classroom time going down the hall to a special education class. Which puts those students in a difficult position sometimes in the classroom because they’ve missed a bunch of the regular classroom conversation of which they, so they’re a little on the outside already. So Shauna is in this group and Kathy notices that they’re discussing, oh I can’t remember the book, anyway. Oh “The Pain and the Great One,” it was. Anyway, Kathy notices that Shauna can’t get into the conversation. She wants to say something, but she can’t. Now Kathy could say to her, Shauna, why don’t you say what you have to say? But she doesn’t, that wouldn’t help the rest of the students learn how to do this.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
JOHNSTON: So she says, does anyone notice anything about Shauna? And one of the other kids said, I think Shauna has something to say but can’t get into the conversation. So Kathy says, Kathy could again say, well, Shauna, why don’t you, but she says, okay, Claire. So why don’t you invite her into the conversation? Well, actually before she says that, she says, “Does anyone else have that experience of not being able to get into the conversation?” Now she does that because that experience, when they know what that feels like, that’s a motive for them to invite the other person, the quiet person into the conversation. It’s empathic concern, you know. They know what it feels like to be on the outside. So that’s one motive for inviting the quiet student in. So then after they’ve had that conversation, she says to Claire, well, why don’t you invite Shauna into the conversation? Again, keeping it with Claire and not Kathy. So then Claire invites her in, and they have a real conversation, a good conversation around Shauna’s comments. And then Kathy says, so what would have happened if Claire hadn’t invited Shauna in? And they all say, well we wouldn’t have had that, you know, that conversation, that great conversation. So again, that’s a causal process that she’s leaning on. She’s saying, if you do this, then this. And this is a self-interested motive for, for inviting the quiet people into the conversation. So then Kathy explains that to them again. And again, it’s saying if Claire hadn’t done this then, you know, so it’s keeping Claire in the agentive role of being the one who did this.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: So it’s her narrative about helping and if Kathy can catch her later, Claire later, and say remember when you did that, and then that conversation occurred? How did that feel? So she’ll feel pretty chuffed about that, but she won’t have noticed that at the time.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: But that’s another motive. Now you’ve got a third layer which is what it feels like. It feels good to do that kind of stuff.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. And this teacher is, is engineering all of that but it’s still, the kid is still doing the thing and will have that muscle memory and that, you know, the psychological experience of doing it to draw back on in the future when another opportunity might present itself organically.
JOHNSTON: Yeah. And you, you can’t teach that in a preset lesson.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: It just, it just won’t work.
GONZALEZ: You have to just look for opportunities, yeah.
JOHNSTON: Right. And it’s because you’re looking for, I mean, teaching is kind of planned opportunism, you know.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: You do have to plan, but you’re also planning for things like that to happen so that you can capitalize on them in the concrete moment. Yeah.
GONZALEZ: That’s really interesting. Okay, so the next example is throwing this out to the class. Are there any other ways to think about this?
JOHNSTON: Well, there again, you’re looking for disagreement, really, because disagreement is the engine of thinking. When kids disagree, I mean, and you want to normalize disagreement so that kids expect it. Sure, we would disagree on that, and then when they, when people disagree, they start justifying their position. So when kids are in classrooms in which it’s normal to disagree, you’ll find logic words like because, if, why, so and words like that are used more often by the students. So they’ll expect, again, to be able to justify their positions, but they wouldn’t have to bother to do that if there weren’t the disagreement in the first place.
GONZALEZ: So it’s just, it’s inviting an opportunity. And I like, again, the very neutral phrasing. Just, are there other ways to think about this?
JOHNSTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: As opposed to, like, who disagrees with this, you know, this person? It’s a little bit more, a lot of the work that you do in “Choice Words” has to do with sort of assuming with your language an intent. And I’ve referenced your work in earlier posts of mine where you’re talking about asking a student maybe about a piece of writing and saying, you know, what are your plans next for this? Which really assumes a lot of agency in the student.
JOHNSTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: And so, I think with this one too, it’s assuming that we’re going to have a nice, like, you know, useful conversation about this as opposed to it being really contentious that we can —
JOHNSTON: Sure. And actually, when kids disagree, we should be sure to do things like say, “Thanks, Bruce and Linda. You know, if you hadn’t disagreed, we never would have gotten to the bottom of that.” So foregrounding the disagreement, because if you ask people to disagree, and then one of them turns out to be wrong or something, you know, you’re stuck with, you’re stuck with that.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: So then people are less inclined to disagree.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. And that is important, making sure that the experience is actually a learning experience.
JOHNSTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: And somewhat pleasant and not, not so uncomfortable that no one wants to do it again.
JOHNSTON: Right. And showing the benefit of, the benefit of disagreement because I think in the end, again, in a democracy, we have to start realizing that the very point of a democracy is to capitalize on what is the human evolutionary advantage, really. And that advantage is that we’re fundamentally social animals, and we can think together. And together, we, the better we are able to think together, the more complex problems we’re able to solve. And that’s, you know, that’s what, you know, democracy ought to be about.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. There’s a, there’s another little piece added on here, just talking about shaping student language with anchor charts, which you’ve talked about a little bit. You referenced that. But talking about principles that we can sort of all agree on in terms of the way that we engage with each other. Do we work on these with students? Do we co-construct them with students? How do these anchor charts happen?
JOHNSTON: Yeah. I find it useful to, well, how we’re going to live in this classroom together, how we’re going to think together. These are spaces where kids can come up with these ideas themselves. I mean we can help shape the development of that but it’s — kids are pretty capable of coming up with, I mean just the idea of we should listen to one another. They’ll come up with that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: And we can, and we can help, in our conversation with them, we can do that, but we can also make it modifiable as we, as we find new ways in which kids can think together. But we do, we do have things like anchor charts in which we can say what kind of things can we say? We can say things like “I agree” or “I disagree.” But is it okay just to disagree? Don’t we need to say why we disagree? Yeah, okay. So I disagree because.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: And we can end up with a list of things that students can, you know, have a role in constructing, and that gives them the options that they can use in conversations productively.
GONZALEZ: Right.
JOHNSTON: But yeah. I mean, just some rules for, you know, this is, what we’re doing here is, this is how children learn to use and manage the social and intellectual space they inhabit, you know, because they have to be able to do this. It’s not good enough for us to set up an intellectual space for them. They have to learn how to do that for themselves because we’re not always going to be there for them.
GONZALEZ: Right. So I like that, you know, most of what we’ve talked about today is teachers carefully choosing the language that they use in order to shape the interactions. But then we also give that, those tools to our students and work with them to continue to develop language for themselves in terms of how they interact with each other.
JOHNSTON: Yeah. Those anchor charts, again, kids, if they had a role in constructing them, they do consult them.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, okay, good. And so, and that’s an important piece of it. If they have had a role, they’re more likely to use them.
JOHNSTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Is that what you’ve seen?
JOHNSTON: Yeah. And yeah, and you know, when kids, when kids are doing an independent discussion, say, of a book. You know, if it breaks down as it will, you know, and particularly at the beginning of the year when they haven’t learned how to do this kind of thing.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: You know, we’ll talk about, okay, so what, you know, what went on here. So let’s review how we do this stuff. Or we can say things like, now you know how to think together. Can you remember that? So we can remind them of how they came up with this. Again, it’s, the anchor charts are really just to sort of reify things that we’ve already talked about.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
JOHNSTON: But they’re modifiable as well, yeah.
GONZALEZ: So the book is “Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning.” And remind me again of the other two books that you have written sort of in between these two editions.
JOHNSTON: Well, one of them, with the eighth-grade students is “Teens Choosing to Read.”
GONZALEZ: Okay. That one sounds fascinating.
JOHNSTON: It’s with Teachers College Press.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
JOHNSTON: And the other one is “Engaging Literate Minds.” That’s a K-3 book.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
JOHNSTON: Which I co-wrote that with half a dozen teachers, yeah.
GONZALEZ: Okay. And I’ll make sure that I provide links to all three so that, in this post, so that people can take a look at all three. Because I know that there are going to be people out there listening who are going to want to see all of those. Because they solve some pretty significant problems that a lot of teachers are dealing with.
JOHNSTON: Sure.
GONZALEZ: Thank you so much, Peter.
JOHNSTON: Thanks for having me on, Jenn. Really appreciate the work you do.
GONZALEZ: Thank you.
To read Peter’s post and find a link to his book, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 238. To get a bimonthly email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.