Choice Words

Additional Choice Words Information

In productive classrooms, teachers don't just teach children skills: they build emotionally and relationally healthy learning communities. Teachers create intellectual environments that produce not only technically competent students, but also caring, secure, actively literate human beings.

Choice Words shows how teachers accomplish this using their most powerful teaching tool: language. Throughout, Peter Johnston provides examples of apparently ordinary words, phrases, and uses of language that are pivotal in the orchestration of the classroom. Grounded in a study by accomplished literacy teachers, the book demonstrates how the things we say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for what children learn and for who they become as literate people. Through language, children learn how to become strategic thinkers, not merely learning the literacy strategies. In addition, Johnston examines the complex learning that teachers produce in classrooms that is hard to name and thus is not recognized by tests, by policy-makers, by the general public, and often by teachers themselves, yet is vitally important.

This book will be enlightening for any teacher who wishes to be more conscious of the many ways their language helps children acquire literacy skills and view the world, their peers, and themselves in new ways.

What Customers Say About Choice Words:

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This book came in the condition it described and came before the expected date. Thanks.

This book does a great job of making you really consider the words you use with your students as a teacher. Not only does it give great advice, but it also gives some great tips and examples of how to approach common situations and what to say. Also, the appendices are prety informative as well. Johnston does a great job.

However, many children will fail to learn to read and write properly without given explicit instruction in phonics and the building blocks of language. In many subjects such as science, structuring the environment to lead children to make their own discoveries is something that all teachers should be doing.

The information presented is nothing new and the interpretations are filtered through the eyes of constructivist bias. The fact that much of the Piaget's theory has been discredited by scientific enquiry seems to have escaped the knowledge of the author.

This book uses a lot of airy fairy language derived from post-structuralism and post-modernism to rehash the same old constructivist views that have been paraded in educational circles for decades. Some things have to be taught.

Methods of teaching that are affiliated with the constructivist thought, including Reading Recovery are glorified, even though they fail to produce the goods when compared to methods of explicit reading instruction like synthetic phonics. Knowledge is not innate.

They don't need this book to tell them that. Constructivists take the point of view that explicit instruction detracts from creativity, but they fail to back up this assertion with scientific evidence.

We are using this book as a book study group in our elementary school It serves as a great springboard for conversation about teaching strategies and learning. The book provides insights to new teachers as well as seasoned teachers and can serve as a way to share and reflect as a learning and teaching community.