The challenges of unaligned language
This post is adapted from an email originally shared on October 4, 2024. If you would like to receive future emails, you can sign up here.
My eight-year-old loves telling jokes that play with multiple meanings of language. Recent zingers include: How does a dog play football? (Rough) Why couldn’t the pig play soccer? (It got pulled.) What did the mama buffalo say to the baby buffalo when it went to college? (Bye, son.) They work because he can rely on his audience to have the same (multiple) understandings of the words he uses.
This month, I have been thinking a lot about the words we use in education. I keep having experiences that illustrate how often we assume a word means the same thing to other educators only to discover it means something totally different to them. I have been noticing how many problems this creates and how emotionally challenging it is to get on the same page.
Let me illustrate with three examples.
Example 1: State coherence: Instruction Partners has been working with a few states that want to ensure all academic departments are aligned around the same vision of instructional excellence and school support. We start by level setting. First, we review the many guidance documents every state sends to districts, identifying where they are using different words to mean the same thing, the same words to mean different things, or just sending conflicting messages. We mirror this back to the leadership team. Then, we facilitate conversations to try to help people discuss and negotiate competing ideas about words like “coach,” “use data to drive instruction,” or even “educator.”
These projects have given me a new appreciation for how vast a problem this is — we always end up having to talk about a lot (and I mean a lot, a lot) of words.
I have also been struck by how passionately folks hold to particular interpretations, definitions, and implications of words and how personal it can feel when someone doesn’t share their understanding. Crossed linguistic wires can be devastating for teams, their stakeholders, and the actions they seek to take. Morale on one team we worked with was crushed by competing interpretations of the term “differentiated instruction.” Differences in understanding of the term and approach to instruction turned quickly into judging others for not caring about kids. Getting to a shared definition required tearful storytelling about students who team members felt they had not served well, deep reviews of bibliographies, and T-charts of similarity and difference.
Even if it is clearly better for students for adults to all be on the same page — and even if it saves time and effort for those adults on the back end — investing the upfront energy and time to have these conversations is far from the norm. It can be done, but it is hard, fastidious, sometimes boring, and sometimes unexpectedly emotional work.
Example 2: Researching principals as instructional leaders: Over the last year, we conducted a research project to understand how principals and system leaders understand principals’ instructional leadership responsibilities and distribute those responsibilities throughout their teams. (We’ll be releasing a paper summarizing our findings in the coming weeks.) At its heart, the project has been a study of the different meanings leaders understand in phrases they use every day, how those different meanings translate into different actions, and how those differences cause confusion and hamper action.
Studying this variation has been fascinating and frustrating. It has been fascinating to understand even wider ranging interpretations of frequently used words than I would have guessed. It turns out, we have so many meanings for words like “coaching,” “observing,” “supporting,” “instruction,” “collaboration,” “data,” and “delegation” that, in some ways, these words have little meaning at all. It has been frustrating to see how many problems language misalignment creates for schools: wasted energy, disappointed expectations, interpersonal conflict, and lack of follow through — consistent results of even subtle confusion.
Example 3: Writing the paper: Using language to write a paper about the way we use language has been its own humbling experience. It turns out that I, too, frequently assume meaning is shared — and it can be a painstaking process to get clear. The team at Instruction Partners working with me on this paper has the job of pointing out things like “our thesis about the importance of clarity is, itself, unclear.” My emotional reaction when we come to these moments is often a combination of 1) frustration that I have to stop and clarify, 2) annoyance that I can’t magically convince others that what I wrote already makes perfect sense, and 3) shame that I didn’t do better.
These experiences remind me of the value of editors with different perspectives to point out what I don’t see. They also remind me of the characteristics that I need to bring to these interactions: curiosity, a little patience, willingness to be wrong, and stamina to keep working at it in the face of difficult feedback.
If we want the benefits of shared language, we’ll have to bring personal humility and put in painstaking and occasionally emotional work to get there. I think it is worth it.
By the time my son picks a profession and (obviously) becomes a teacher, I hope he will encounter an education community with a more reliable shared understanding of the words we use. I hope this because it will mean we have a better shot at making things better. I also hope this because I know he’ll use it to treat us to jokes I love as much as math. And then sum.
