Some education books add to my toolbox-- giving me management techniques, lesson ideas, or assessment tips. Other books are game-changers-- profoundly changing my view of teaching and learning. Choice Words is a paradigm stretching book about how we can change the dynamics of our classrooms and guide students toward their independence and agency. I've read Johnston's book 5 times at least and it definitely helps remind me of what matters.

This book provides a lot of good tips for how to communicate with your students. I need to reread this once I start teaching.

When visitors enter a classroom, they can immediately sense specific things about what goes on in that classroom. Peter Johnston and his colleagues studied classrooms where students appeared to have a sense of agency, were strategic thinkers, viewed themselves as literate readers and writers, and treated one another with empathy and respect. Johnston found that there was a definite commonality that could be detected in these highly effective and productive classrooms. That common piece was the way that the teachers use language to help their students build narratives in which they are readers, writers, poets, people with good ideas and strong skills, and members of a community that discusses, wonders, examines, and learns together in a respectful way.

Choice Words is all about bringing these examples of the effective use of language to our attention. Throughout the book Johnston shares specific examples of teacher language and the effects this language has on students. He also explains why this language works the way it does.

As a teacher, I know that there are things that I say and do unwittingly that may have positive or negative effects on my students. Johnston's goal is to make teachers more aware so that they can incorporate the effective language into their daily dealings with students until the language becomes a part of who they are and how they interact with students.

While the focus of this book is supposed to be the language arts, it has much farther reaching implications. It is really about creating intellectual environments in which students successfully become competent, more knowledgeable, and more able, but also become more confident, caring individuals who can think critically and logically, problem solve, and collaborate with others to make something greater than they could on their own.

I found this to be a very powerful, thought-provoking book. I'm sure that I will be revisiting it often in the future!

It is a special thing when a book affirms your most fundamental professional beliefs and practices, but when you can also take new learning and new inspiration from that book as well. This was the case for me with Peter Johnston's Choice Words. Even though it has been three years since I first read Johnston's book, it still resonates with me strongly and impacts my teaching. I often find connections to and examples of things I read in the book as I go about my daily work. This is a book that really did impact my life, and one that has great "staying power." All teachers could benefit from reading this book about how the way we communicate with students can empower them or tear them down.

About half of this book was good; the other half seemed to regress in intellectual difficulty and I kept wanting more from it.

A classic for every teacher's bookshelf.

A tad repetitive, but as a teacher who tries to be conscious of the rhetorical subtext of my words, this book opened my eyes to more effective, positive, and intellectually impactful ways to communicate with students. CHOICE WORDS is definitely a book I will re-visit in the 2019-2020 school year!

A short book, but not a quick read. Very wordy, and unnecessarily so.

I found it ironic that the name of the book and the theme of the book seem to be targeted to helping teachers improve the reading comprehension and writing skills of their students; especially since so much of the book is written using words that are difficult to understand and have no meaning to the target audience for this book. It defeats the purpose. I am an avid reader, but I was frustrated continuously throughout the book, as I found myself distracted and trying to discern the meaning of words such as "agentive," which I would venture to guess was used at least 100 times (no exaggeration). I don't understand the author's fascination with that one particular word, but regardless, the entire book begs the question, "Why not write the book in a way that is easy to understand, seeing that the purpose is intended to ultimately help students read books in a way that is easy to understand?" I could easily see many teachers giving up in the middle of this book and not even finishing it, and that is unfortunate because there are some good tools and techniques demonstrated within the pages of this book.

With that said, I do like the layout of the book. Each chapter has paragraph headings that are questions that teachers can use in formative assessment to help students begin to learn how to learn. If someone took this book and just studied some of those questions and immediately put them into practice, it could make a difference in the growth of their students, and it would go a long way toward improving someone's teaching skills.

Relatable, applicable, and easy to read. I just wish it had been organized differently.

Need to read again and again to let it all soak in. Added so much to myself professionally!