How our word choices can empower our students

What teachers write about students has enormous potential to affect their lives. Lauren Porosoff encourages teachers to use their words to empower students to take an active role in their own learning. When teachers use adjectives to describe students, they may be attaching certain fixed characteristics to those students. Verbs, on the other hand, put the focus on behavior, and adverbs bring attention to how students execute certain behaviors. Nouns can give a clear picture of what students are doing, and deliberate use of conjunctions can put the emphasis on the correct pieces of information. And avoiding overuse of the pronoun I can help teachers keep the focus off themselves, while using students’ preferred pronouns conveys respect for student identities