We use a lot of jargon and shorthand in education, just as other professions do. Our shorthand helps us move quickly through conversations, establishing that we have a shared understanding of an important idea and allowing us to get on to real work. The danger of using this secret code, though, is that maybe we don’t really have a shared understanding of an important idea. Maybe we just think we do and base subsequent interactions on that assumption. Sometimes we waste valuable resources because we each had very different ideas. Learning Forward is just as guilty of using secret code. We even put code words on the cover of this magazine. I’d like to expand on some of the terms we use throughout this issue