We Should Be Able to Talk About Behavior in Both Technical and Plain Language
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that educators should be able to discuss student behavior using clear, direct language rather than only clinical jargon.
Key Takeaways
- Plain language has value - Calling a behavior what it is — misbehavior, violence, defiance — is honest and useful
- Technical language has its place - Clinical terminology is appropriate in IEP meetings and clinical settings
- Don't hide behind jargon - Using clinical language to avoid calling violence 'violence' obscures the problem
Transcript
I don't know if you're hearing all this neuroscience vocabulary when it comes to talking about student behavior, but I'm hearing more and more we're talking about how a student is dysregulated, or we're talking about their amygdala, or we're using all these kind of medical and technical sounding terms that might be helpful in the sense that they help us understand what's going on in a student's brain and kind of what they're dealing with.
and that could help us build empathy.
But I'm also a little bit concerned that we're just introducing confusion and we're making it harder to decide what the right course of action is when there's something that's unsafe.
I don't know if you're hearing this, let me know if you're hearing this use of kind of very technical vocabulary and lots of references to the brain, but it seems like we should also be able to talk in common sense terms about just the interpersonal reality, right?
Like, if you get arrested as an adult for assaulting someone, Talking about the neuroscience of like why you assaulted them is probably not going to get you very far in the courtroom.
And I just wonder if we're not doing students any favors by kind of obfuscating things and making this sound more complicated than it is when we have unsafe behaviors.
And certainly we should be able to speak with precision.
We should be able to use technical vocabulary.
But I also think we should be able to speak in kind of plain language.
And if something is unsafe, we don't need extensive vocabulary from neurobiology to say that something is unsafe.
I think we can just say that in regular language.
and we can probably make better decisions if we're using plainer language.
So I'm curious if this is something that has come up in your work, if you were coming across more technical language, and if that's making it actually more difficult to communicate.
Let me know what you think.