Language is powerful and words matter. When I first began coaching basketball I caught myself referring to the team as “you” when the team lost and “we” when the team won. It was a subconscious way of excluding myself from responsibility for losing, which profoundly embarrassed me when I realised what I was doing. Ever since, I have used “we” whether we win or lose, the inclusive language of team.  In a classroom, inclusive language helps students view learning as a cooperative rather than a competitive endeavour and it helps students take more responsibility for the conduct of the class, sharing power with the teacher and co-learning together.

Project Zero’s Daniel Wilson, studied group learning in adventure racing teams for his doctoral thesis and he found that the most successful teams were far more likely to use conditional language when they were lost than the teams that were not so successful. “We might be here” rather than “This is where we are.” Teams that use conditional language are better at pulling together, pooling ideas, and harnessing group knowledge. In contrast, when absolute language is used, it seems defensive and assertive. When teachers use conditional language, students quickly catch on that they are looking for collective meaning-making and building on others’ thinking, rather than trying to guess correct answers. Wilson’s research also found that the successful teams that were using conditional language were more likely to ask each other questions and more likely to build on each other’s ideas.

Discussing this with classes can have a dramatic impact on the way that they talk and learn as a group. Several years ago one of my classes developed the metaphor of building on each other’s ideas like ice-cream scoops, instead of pop-corning their own individual thoughts. They even went as far as self-assessing themselves at the end of a class, “We did too much pop-corning today and not enough ice-creaming.”