Choice Words Book Review

I had previously plogged this, but let's go ahead and get this on the interwebs.  :)

Choice Words, by Peter Johnston explores how language affects learning.  Johnston analyzes key words and phrases of four elementary school teachers, explaining how the teachers’ language can influence children’s ability to name and notice, their identity, their agency, their flexibility and ability to transfer, the type of knowledge they gain and their ability to become members of a democratic community.  In his first chapter, Johnston lays out his theory and his purposes for writing the book; in the subsequent chapters, the structure becomes more like bullets lists, giving an example sentence from one of the teachers in bold followed by an explanation of how that sentence or the particular words in that sentence affect learning.  These explanations range in length from a paragraph to a few pages.  Johnston emphasizes most highly that children must learn to develop a curiosity to discover and learn about the world around them (naming and noticing) and have the opportunity to shape their learning as they figure out who they are in the classroom and in the world (identity and agency).  The rest of the book depicts how the topics in the other chapters encourage the development of naming, noticing, identity and agency.

Johnston has obviously put a significant amount of work into this book as he looks at very specific word choices and explains thoroughly how those words affect children’s learning.  Given how much information is given in a short space, Johnston seems to recognize that a reader can easily forget what she has learned.  To combat this, he calls uses a wealth of examples, calls back to what he deems as the most important words to use and ends each chapter by asking the reader to apply what she has read in the chapter.  In these ending applications, Johnston seems to be practicing what he is preaching, allowing the reader to begin to notice how language can shape learning, discover who she is as a teacher and have some control over her learning.  Johnston also gives the reader a sort of “get started” guide, describing five ways the reader can initiate changing the conversation in her classroom to look more like the language in the book.  The combination of specific word choices, the five concrete examples and the applications allow the reader to walk away from the book with real ways to apply the book to her classroom.  In other words, the book takes small nuggets of theory and concentrates on putting these theories into practice.

I would have been interested to see a deeper critique of the use of questioning in classrooms.  Johnston seems to imply that questions can have different purposes, spending a paragraph discussing how teachers can use questions to drive conversations in particular directions and control responses, while highly praising teachers for asking questions that allow children to problem solve and explain their thinking.  Johnston does not explain, however, what kinds of questions stifle learning nor how they close down conversation.  Moreover, he does not explore how changing a question into a statement – or vice versa – would have changed the learning that gets done or affected the community formed in the classroom.