The Words We Choose

As a third-grade teacher, Lily Howard Scott noticed how she spoke to students impacted more than just their experience in the classroom. How teachers speak to their students and intentional shifts in language can nurture children’s inner lives, foster self-regulation, and reduce perfectionism, she says, and become their inner voice.

“The thing about teachers, particularly elementary school teachers, is they have this superpower, which is that they catch kids at a moment where their capacity for neuroplasticity is more remarkable than it will ever be again. These kids are developing theories about themselves and their abilities, and they're bucketing themselves in all sorts of ways that may stay with them for the rest of their lives,” Scott says. “They're establishing thinking patterns that will stay with them — and elementary school teachers spend 1000 hours a year with their students in the same connected classroom … — just subtle shifts in language that help kids learn these basic things, that they have agency within, that they can choose which thoughts and feelings to amplify and which to quiet.” 

Scott shares that young children are remarkably receptive to reflective conversations about language and often adapt the terms in creative, personal ways — such as a student renaming their “inner voice” the “President Decider.” She highlights the power of reframing mistakes as "brilliant mistakes," which invites curiosity rather than shame. This shift, supported by neuroscience and the work of researchers like Lisa Feldman Barrett and Carol Dweck, helps children interpret challenges with a mindset geared toward growth and resilience.

How to make these shifts is now the focus of Scott’s work and the central theme of her book, The Words that Shape Us, where she shares classroom-tested strategies and brain-changing teacher language. 

Learning to speak differently as a teacher or even parent can be challenging, but Scott stresses the importance of modeling lifelong learning alongside children. For instance, by admitting their own struggles with perfectionism or learning from errors, teachers can foster trust and mutual growth. Scott explains that language like “feelings are visitors” (inspired by Rumi’s "The Guest House") helps children understand emotional regulation and agency. She admits that young children are particularly receptive to language shifts. Perhaps even more importantly, the effort to tweak how we speak to children may also play a role with children’s mental health. 

“If your mind is better company when you're 7, you hold on to these language nuggets and you repeat them to yourself when you're 17, so I think elementary school, it's not the precursor to serious learning. It's the most serious learning, and we should tip our hats to elementary school teachers and understand the immense and enduring influence they can have,” she says.

In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Scott shares insight into when children are taught empowering, compassionate language early, they carry it with them for life, enabling healthier thinking patterns and emotional well-being. She provides caution against well-meaning but common phrases like “try harder” which may inadvertently shame children.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Lily Howard Scott knows the words we use with children don't just shape conversations but have power to shape their inner lives. As a third grade teacher, Lily noticed how her language influenced her students' ability to self-regulate, practice self-compassion, and push back against perfectionism, so she began experimenting with the words she used, discovering just how much language impacts a child's emotional and social development. I wanted to understand what role the way we speak to kids plays in their well-being and how we frame mistakes can create opportunities for growth. First, I asked how her students responded to language shifts.

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Elementary schoolers as opposed to, let's say, middle schoolers or high schoolers, they're just sort of less self-conscious, they're more open-hearted. They were very straightforward with me about which language nuggets sort of struck a chord with them, which language nuggets they wanted to adapt. We would have fascinating conversations around, very metacognitive conversations around how language nestled in their inner lives. One example of this is I remember my third grade student Harper. I introduced her to the idea of having a wisest, kindest, most true-to-you self-inside that gets to choose what thoughts and impulses to sort of amplify or quiet. She said, "I don't want to call it an inner voice. Can I call it a president decider, because it chooses what to pay attention to in my own head?" I just thought that was so wonderful, her adaptation.

JILL ANDERSON: Can you share an example of a simple shift in phrasing and how it transforms a child's self-perception?

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: An example I love to give is the phrase, "What a brilliant mistake. What learning can you find in it?" Some research that has really informed my thinking is by Lisa Feldman Barrett, actually, who's been at Harvard and Northeastern, who wrote that beautiful book, How Emotions Are Made, in which she explains, emotions don't happen to us. We make them. They're these predictions that we make in the nanosecond rooted in previous experiences. Let's say, imagine a second-grader who rooted in previous experiences has a brain that's wired to predict, "Uh-oh, no, not today," when that first-grader makes a mistake. "I'm going to shove my paper under my desk. I'm going to hope nobody notices." That first-grader doesn't have the chance to investigate his mistake and to learn from it, right, because he's always looking away, and because the way grownups talk to kids becomes the way they talk to themselves, if his teacher says over and over, "No, no, no, when we sit with our mistakes, when we call them brilliant mistakes, that's when we uncover really juicy learning," maybe that first-grader begins to say to himself in the micro-moment of making a mistake, "It's okay, it's a brilliant mistake. What learning does it have for me?"

What Barrett says, she calls that an energized determination, and as the first-grader internalizes it, or the second-grader, as self-talk, he sort of seeds his brain to predict differently, so that in the moment of noticing a mistake, he doesn't meet it with a full-body, dysregulated, sweaty palms, churning stomach response, but with regulation and curiosity. To me, a subtle shift like that, I'm not so much interested in how words help kids communicate with each other, or even with me, though thank God they can do that. I'm more interested in how words shape kids from the inside out, and that's an example of a phrase, when repeated as self-talk, can really shape a kid from the inside out and help them lean into learning from errors as opposed to looking away at all costs.

JILL ANDERSON: The mistake is a really interesting one to think about, because most people don't like making mistakes, and it comes with a little bit of shame. It comes with embarrassment. It can come with a lot of feelings, and so when you reframe it, it takes on a whole different meaning.

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Totally, and Carol Dweck's research reveals that some of the most powerful cognitive growth of all is only accessible to us when we really sit with our mistakes and investigate them. I have compassion for any kid who doesn't want to do that, because it's probably rooted in exactly as you said, an experience where they felt shamed for making the mistake, or really embarrassed, or encountered snickering peers. It makes a lot of sense why many kids would not want to sit with their errors, and so subtle language like this just re-frames it for the child. They repeat it to themselves. I mean, as Barrett says, it's almost like a magic trick, the way that words can seed our predictions and transform how we think and feel in challenging moments.

JILL ANDERSON: How challenging was it to shift and alter how you said something?

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: My honest response is that there are many things that were hard for me as a teacher. There were executive functioning, keeping track of where things were, staying on time. Something that hasn't been hard for me in particular is being playful with language and just being interested in trying on language. For me, another shift I've really been leaning into is the idea of telling kids that feelings are like visitors, inspired by Rumi's beautiful poem, The Guest House, just so that they realize they are separate from their feeling, feelings come and go. I found my interest in poetry, my interest in language, it was so joyful to bring that to the classroom and offer those nuggets up to kids. Then, of course, they'd adapt them in all sorts of beautiful ways, and so for me it just felt playful, but many other things felt much more arduous. Dr. Ross Greene says, different things are hard for different people, and leaning into experimenting with language, yeah, it's always been a joy for me.

JILL ANDERSON: The reason I said that was because this idea of the brilliant mistake, it seems so easy, and anyone, a parent, a teacher, could really take that and run with it if they have the self-awareness, I guess, to do it at home or whatnot. A lot of us have not either grown up in families or had prior education experiences where things were framed in such ways. It's almost a new approach.

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Well, what I love about that is that it's so powerful in an appropriate way to just share that with kids. I love what Parker Palmer says in The Courage to Teach. It's something like, the most powerful tool you have at your disposal as a teacher isn't your curriculum, it's yourself. It's your willingness to be vulnerable in the service of learning. I don't mean vulnerable in a way that crosses the line, not unprofessional, but just honest.

A teacher who says something like, "For hundreds of years people thought that mistakes were something to be ashamed of. In fact, when I was a kid, even when I was a grownup, I would feel that sting of embarrassment when I made a mistake. Can you give me a me-too sign or a mirror sign if you've felt that way? Well, in the past two decades, we've learned from scientists that actually, when we pay attention to them, all sorts of new epiphanies are available to us that weren't before. What I'm going to be working on right next to you is celebrating my mistakes, and making sure I gain an ability to kind of sit with the discomfort of them and really look at them, so we're going to make a brilliant mistake wall and all of us are going to jot on a post-it a mistake, or draw it, when we make it. We're going to search it for learning, and I'm going to be doing that work right alongside you because this is new to me."

I think that's so powerful, for kids to sort of see their teacher navigate their humanity in that way, and then of course they'll follow suit. Many teachers who I work with for whom the language feels a little out there or just it feels very different from the way that they were spoken to, they're transparent about that alongside the kids, and I think kids really perk up and listen when it feels like a grownup is telling them the truth.

JILL ANDERSON: I mean, I just imagine a whole classroom of children who would get really excited to make mistakes, which is so different than what I would've experienced growing up.

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Yes, or if it's not so much to make mistakes, it's more they're excited to sit with them. My co-teacher, Annalise, and I, we'd give the kids a math assessment, and then everyone had to search for a brilliant mistake in it, and circle it, and really think, "Okay, what learning does it have for me?" We said, "Who would like to share their brilliant mistake underneath the document camera?" Everybody raised their hand, "I do, I do," and we felt it was so special to see how excited they were to all sort of lean into that learning together.

JILL ANDERSON: There's a lot in the world about the dire situation of children's mental health today, the high suicide rates, the high anxiety and depression rates. Why do you think this is, and what role do you think shifting our language plays in helping children?

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Yeah, wow, that's a big question and a really important one. I think that it's all so individual in terms of the kiddo, but if we zoom out, there are these macro factors that do seem to really be having an input. Of course, one of them is, and our previous surgeon general has deemed it a national emergency, but kids are lonelier than ever before. They're more disconnected to each other than they've ever been before. I read that 40% of kids eight to 12 use social media already, which of course, you're comparing your insides to somebody else's outsides through a screen, which leads to all sorts of painful experiences within.

Thomas Curran's recent research indicates that perfectionist tendencies are soaring, and I'm so interested in that. Why is that? I know that parents, in lovely ways and in hard ways, are much more involved in their kids' academic lives, much more preoccupied with sort of managing their kids' achievement, if you will, and extracurriculars.

There are a myriad of reasons why kids are suffering, and I think it's funny, dysregulated anxiety is often diagnosed as a, quote-unquote, behavior issue, and then regulated anxiety, it just masquerades as high achievement, so it doesn't really matter if you look like a glittering superstar at school or if you are more obviously struggling. I do think that all kids benefit from words they can use to talk to themselves with love. The thing about teachers, particularly elementary school teachers, is they have this superpower, which is that they catch kids at a moment where their capacity for neuroplasticity is more remarkable than it will ever be again. These kids are developing sort of theories about themselves and their abilities, and they're sort of bucketing themselves in all sorts of ways that may stay with them for the rest of their lives. They're establishing thinking patterns that will stay with them, and elementary school teachers spend 1000 hours a year with their students in the same connected classroom. The kids aren't moving to specialist teachers yet.

Just subtle shifts in language that help kids learn these basic things, that they have agency within, that they can choose which thoughts and feelings to amplify and which to quiet. I love teaching even kids as young as four about the concept of an inner voice that can do that. Many kids don't know they have that agency. Language like leaning into ish-full-ness or brilliant mistake language to help them operate with more self-compassion, language like, I love teaching kids about what it means to turn on your birder mindset, which means to move through your school day just like a birder looks for beauty, and hopes to see a flash of something interesting. Kids, if they have language to wrap around the idea of, "I'm going to find what I look for, I'm going to look for something beautiful or interesting here," they'll find it, even if it's just on the walk to the lunchroom, that all these subtle shifts I think help kids' minds just become better company.

If your mind is better company when you're seven, you hold on to these language nuggets and you repeat them to yourself when you're 17, so I think elementary school, it's not the precursor to serious learning. It's the most serious learning, and we should tip our hats to elementary school teachers and understand the immense and enduring influence they can have.

JILL ANDERSON: Many times we don't think about elementary school as a time when you need to be super high achieving, right?

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Yeah.

JILL ANDERSON: Can you talk a little bit more about that and what you see in those kids, and maybe how the approach with them and words needs to be shifted?

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Absolutely. Well, it's funny you said ... Yes, we might not think of elementary school as a highly pressurized place, but many people say, "I am as I am seen." Another way of thinking about that is, "I am as I hear you talk about me," and if you can imagine that, quote-unquote, good kid, the kid who does great academically in first, second, third grade, who sits on the rug quietly with a still body, that kid is hearing all day, "Oh, thank you, Lily. I see you're sitting crisscross-applesauce, still as can be. Who else is? Oh, I see that Lily's finished." They're inundated with language that basically sends the message, "I value you because of the way you comply with my instructions, the way you achieve in the way I've asked you to, and the way you model for your more dysregulated classmates what to do." That is so much pressure for that little person, and that really hit home for me, when my student Harper, in third grade, she was an exceptionally high achieving student, and I told myself this false story about her, like, "Oh, her inner life must be hunky-dory, because everything comes easily to her. She's so well-liked. She seems to move through the school day with such ease."

She wrote a poem about a feeling visitor. It was the voice of pressure. I know the poem so well now, I can almost recite it by heart. She writes, "Pressure is red-faced, open-mouthed, knocking on the door of my brain. Pressure yells, 'Raise your hand higher, show that you care.' I'm trying. I'm trying." It reminded me, it's hard to be Harper, too. When I gave her this idea of wrapping words around an inner voice that gets to choose what to pay attention to in your own brain, and this comes from David Foster Wallace, who says learning how to think means learning how to choose what to pay attention to in your own mind, she wrote this beautiful poem between President Decider and Pressure, and Pressure says, "You have to do your challenge work," and President Decider says, "No, you don't. It's good for you to play, too."

I think the most powerful thing we can give those kids is this. Just because you have a thought or a feeling visitor that says, "Raise your hand higher, always do your challenge work, do this," you don't have to always let it be the CEO of your brain. You have this other, truest, wisest, most you part of you, that can say, "Thanks for your contribution, but you know what? I know it's good for me to play too." Almost normalizing for kids early how typical it is to have conversations in your head all day long, and how we all have impulses and feelings which may not serve us in the moment or may not be rooted in truth. I think many adults don't realize that, but many seven-year-olds surely don't, and so giving them that offering of that kind of inner agency helps kids who really tilt towards perfectionism just have more agency within themselves, and they can operate with a lot more self-compassion when they realize they don't always have to give so much credence to that part of themselves within. You don't have to be harsh with that part of yourself, but you also don't have to always let it lead the way. Does that resonate?

JILL ANDERSON: Yes. Yeah, it totally does. I mean, just mentioning how kids see what's going on, they're very perceptive. They recognize. They can read the room, essentially. It's fascinating.

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Right, and their brains are wired to categorize, so it's their eyes are shifting left and right, thinking, "Okay, what's my role? Do I need to be the good kid? Who's the bad kid? What is expected of me? How can I give the adults around me what they want so that I feel safe?" When we constantly praise those kids for the ways in which they meticulously comply, there's this own toxic underbelly to that, where they actually, as they grow up, can have a lot of trouble kind of taking risks and listening to themselves and jumping into assignments that don't have clear expectations, because they're so programmed to think, "No, no, no, I need to do it just the way you told me to."

JILL ANDERSON: Right. What are some of the most common phrases adults use that unintentionally discourage or limit kids?

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Well, here's the good news. As somebody who says things that I regret every day, the good news is that we're always going to do it, and then, all we have to do is, so many have shared about, Dr. Kennedy, especially, that then you just model a shame-free apology and you say, "Whoops, actually, that wasn't what I meant. I'm so sorry. Here's something closer to the truth." Just normalizing, we're all going to say stuff all the time that we regret, but if we're trying to be more deliberate about specific things to avoid, I think one subtle one is, sometimes a teacher or a parent might say to a kid something really seemingly supportive, like, "Keep trying, keep trying, try harder. You've got this, you've got this." I do it too, all the time, and sometimes actually the kid is just trying with all their might, and telling them to try harder can sometimes teach them this lesson, which is that, "Oh, I guess trying doesn't work." Usually for kids, if they're not doing well, as Dr. Ross Greene says, kids do well if they can, which doesn't knock you off your chair until you consider the alternative, kids do well if they want to, which he believes is misguided and wrong. I do too.

Under the kids do well if they can umbrella, if a kid isn't doing well, it's likely because something is hard for them. They have a lagging skill or an unmet need or an unsolved problem, so instead of saying, "Try harder, try harder," I'm working on saying, "Can you tell me more about what feels hard in this moment, about getting started with your writing or about putting your shoes on quickly or about not calling out?" Then, depending on what the kid says, I can actually offer them a strategy or a tool as opposed to just saying, "No, no, no, it's an issue of motivation. Just try harder." I think that's a pretty critical one, asking kids, normalizing, "Different things are hard for different people. Can you tell me what feels hard about not calling out?" I remember a kid once said to me, "If I don't call out, I feel like I'm going to forget all my ideas," so I gave him a little clipboard with three post-its, and I said, "I'll call on you twice and you just draw or write what your other ideas are. I promise I'll read them at choice time." Then he finally had a strategy, and the behavior evaporated, whereas when I just said, "Don't call out, try harder," well, he didn't have a strategy, so he kept calling out.

It's also true for adults. When I don't do well, it's usually not because I'm trying to disrespect somebody or needle them. It's just because something is hard for me and it's kind of getting in my way. I'm struggling and I need to think about what's hard for me, and then I can do better.

JILL ANDERSON: A few episodes ago on the EdCast, we had some folks on talking about how to reduce stress in schools, and one of the things that continually came up in that episode was how schools are designed based on punitive measures. They're designed on discipline control. Is there a way to balance this need for structure and discipline while still using empowering, affirming language?

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Definitely, and this actually connects right to Dr. Ross Green's work, the sticks and carrot idea, and I listened to that episode. I really enjoyed it. The idea of, "Okay, if you do this, I'm going to give you this, and if you don't do this, I'm going to shame you in this way." When I was teaching my first year, they gave me this sort of horrifying yardstick with green on the top, and yellow, and then orange, and all the first-graders' names were attached to the green, and as they made mistakes, I was expected to move their clip to the yellow. I mean, can you imagine? First of all, our prefrontal cortex doesn't even work when we're ashamed, right? I was inhibiting all learning in that moment, but also, I'm not giving the kid any strategy or tool to do better. I'm just embarrassing them.

Anyway, strategies like that fall squarely under the kids do well if they want to category, and they just don't work. Under the kids do well if they can, this language is actually essential, I think, to having a classroom that feels safe and that feels orderly, and that feels loving and connected. That this isn't kind of fluffy, soft language that makes classrooms chaotic. It's the opposite. The other strategy, in the end, just ends up with more dysregulated kids who feel shamed and terrified and dysregulated, and who are crying, whereas this language, "Different things are hard for different people, tell me what feels hard for you about this," actually empowers kids to sort of name their struggles and be coached accordingly, which in turn leads to more regulation. When I hear from school leaders, "Okay, but I care about discipline," I'm like, "Don't you understand that if how you feel at school is always linked to how you do at school, if this language helps kids feel better, they're going to do better?" They're going to do better in this beautiful way they can carry with them for always, right, as opposed to just feeling scared.

JILL ANDERSON: We're talking a lot about elementary school, but I'm wondering if this is something that can work for kids as they get older, even high-schoolers.

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Absolutely. I mean, to be honest, the language in the book, I find myself trying to rely on it every day, and sometimes I do it well and sometimes I don't, but for high-schoolers, absolutely. I think we all know that high-schoolers can feel their feelings really, really deeply, and I think if you're 16, it's a really powerful reminder for that 16-year-old to be able to say, "Okay, I feel this swell of rage, but I am not my rage. It's a feeling visitor. It comes and it goes, but it's not who I am." That's really powerful, or, I have in there some just-because language stems. For a teenager to be able to say something like, "Just because I didn't get into this high school doesn't mean that I'm not an excellent student or that I won't love the place where I already go," giving them language to hold onto paradoxical thinking like that, it's a book that is definitely a tribute to the influence of those who care for young children. I also like to think that it's a book for, or that these language suggestions really just help anybody who's alive operate with a little bit more metacognition and self-compassion and joy.

JILL ANDERSON: What's one small language shift teachers or parents could make today that would have significant impact?

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: I think it has to do with your goal. Maybe I'll ask you, what is a goal that you have as a parent or as an educator, either for yourself or for your kiddo, that you wish you had more language to kind of wrap around?

JILL ANDERSON: I would say as a parent, having the awareness, I think, is often really difficult. My child got her report card this week and was looking at it, and she commented something to me that felt like disappointment about the fact that she was just meeting her grade level and that she wasn't getting the next level up in any of the categories.

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: I've actually heard this from so many parents. I'm a bit of an anarchist about grades, for this reason. I often reference Jerry Mueller in his book, The Tyranny of Metrics, where he says, "Much that is unimportant can be measured, and much that is important can never be measured." It's just human nature that when we see our own qualities kind of stuffed within some metric, it's a little bit unsettling. What does M mean, meeting expectations, versus E? To be honest, I kind of think it's all a hoax. I've seen report cards where I know it's all Ms simply to prevent parents from saying, "My kid isn't challenged," even when the kid is an E. Do you know what I mean? Or, I've seen all Ms when the kid actually isn't really an M, just to prevent a meeting on the opposite side.

I might say to the kid something like, "This is one way that we have information for the teacher to know how to be a great teacher, but it doesn't tell you anything about your worth as a learner. That could never be confined to an M or to an E or to a nearly approaching. There's no letter that could represent your deep creativity and your interest in the world around you and all of your skills." Almost normalizing for kids early, "Don't worry too much about the metrics because metrics are inherently flawed." You could even share that. There's been a lot of research around grades and metrics and how they just can never fully capture all the beautiful things about a student, so the wisest scientists out there say, "Take what's helpful from them to inform your teaching and to inform your learning, but never equate your self-worth to them." What I've found helpful is saying something about it, almost planting a seed, so if you know it's coming, saying something at some random moment like when you're making a sandwich, that's like a think-aloud for you.

Like, "Oh, when I got grades, sometimes I'd be tempted to think, 'Oh man, does this capture the full picture of who I am as a learner?' Then I'd remind myself, 'No, it doesn't at all,' and that's just important to keep in mind," and then you move on, and it almost looks like she hasn't heard you, but your language kind of nestles within her. It's just harder for kids to listen, I think, when they feel a little bit elevated, right? When they feel a little bit anxious in that moment of opening the report card.

JILL ANDERSON: I imagine there are folks who are listening, whether it's a student of theirs or whether it's their own child, who may have the opposite experience, where their kid presents as they just do not care.

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Are we talking about a kid who just doesn't want to get started, or who you feel sort of doesn't do their best work?

JILL ANDERSON: Right, because I feel like that's sort of the flip side to the other kid in the classroom.

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Yeah. It's funny, I have compassion for those kids, because I think often they are asked to do work in school that's deeply boring, and it's a really developmentally appropriate response to be like, "Why should I care about this? What is this? What does that have to do with anything that's important to me?" A little bit of language I offer at the very beginning of the book is this idea of saying to kids something like this. "I am so excited to teach you, not the curriculum. Everything that you bring to our classroom and community matters, your interests, your idiosyncrasies, your hopes." Starting a kid like that, who's generally disengaged, really finding out early, what is a kid's interest? Does he know a lot about Pokemon? Is he interested in basketball? Making sure that whatever writing you're doing at the beginning of the year, working through this asset-based lens where you're sending the message, "You're not a cog in my classroom machine doing this boring stuff. I want you to create a comic how-to book about how to dribble," or whatever it is, "An all-about book about every single Pokemon character."

I think we need to let go of this idea that all kids are working on the same genre or the same unit of study. If we want kids to care about their work, we better tailoring their work to the people who they are, and once they begin feeling like, oh, their contributions matter, "My teacher is actually curious about how much I know about this," they're coming from a place of strength. They'll be so much more engaged, and then they'll start telling themselves a new story about who they are at school. "No, I can be successful at school. I am a writer at school." Then, ironically, they become much more able to kind of dip into assignments where they have a little bit less agency, because they already feel successful. I'd say just teach the kid not the curriculum and let their interest lead the way, when kids are disengaged.

JILL ANDERSON: Well, thank you so much, Lily. You have offered so much and things that I will be trying as well, probably tonight.

LILY HOWARD SCOTT: Things I'm still working on every day. Thank you so much for having me, Jill. It was really a pleasure to chat with you.

JILL ANDERSON: Lily Howard Scott is an educator and author of, “The Words That Shape Us: The Science-Based Power of Teaching Language.” I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.