How Limiting Language Impacts Students

predictive patterns. Overcoming these pessimistic predictions requires intentional learning that results in a meaningful reward. In this context, it’s no surprise that we hear limiting language in educational settings because it is to the negative that human brains default first. Educators, despite their best efforts to be more, are in fact humans. However, once limiting language appears, it needs to be addressed as quickly as possible through intentional learning for educators. If it is not, the limiting language can translate into tangible impacts on students. Allowed to persist, limiting language can set itself into the culture and accepted practice of a district or school and will be much more difficult to change (Wang et al., 2020). These implications are the subject of the next sections.

Limiting language may seem benign; after all, what’s the harm in saying a student is behind or noting that a student will be fine once he transfers to special education? But limiting language is not benign at all. Newberg and Waldman (2013) state that “language shapes our behavior, and each word we use is imbued with multitudes of personal meaning” (p. 4). Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argues in posthumously published writings that once we use a word or words to describe something, that description can become the definition of the object (Wittgenstein, 2009). In education, what is being defined are expectations for students’ academic success. Terms like low-achieving and troublemaker acquire a student’s face and voice. The negative descriptor defines the student in the teacher’s mind. Limiting language no longer becomes innocuous, but rather ensnaring.

This is the mechanism behind perceptual predetermination, a bias that organizations may hold toward subgroups and individual students (Muhammad, 2018). This perceptual predetermination normalizes limiting language. However, John Hattie and Klaus Zierer’s (2018) research warns us that students’ life situations and prior achievements do not necessarily define them. Hattie and Zierer (2018) write that previous performance is not a guarantee of future performance, but when teachers assume students will continue to achieve at the same level throughout their academic careers, it can become so.

When educators refer to students as “low” or “behind,” they unknowingly launch a vicious cycle for the students. Using limiting language becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when the students in question do not make the same progress as their peers. The “adults implicitly learn, without effort or awareness” (Smith, 2011, p. 55), that the students whom they refer to as “red students” or “those kids” simply do not close their academic gaps. Once those subconscious thoughts move into the cerebral cortex, they become part of how the educator sees the world and treats students. According to Robert J. Marzano (2017), “the lower the expectations,