BB&N is a school where you can bring your authentic self. The engagement and dedication of our students, educators, and families form the fabric of our community. Students grow and build confidence in an environment that combines high expectations with a culture of care and compassion. Offering each student a gateway for unlocking their full potential, we cultivate global citizens who will inspire change.

It is easy to dismiss school mission statements as mere corporate rhetoric. However, if you look closely, BB&N’s message carries a different tone than a typical traditional school mission statement, such as this one from the Columbine High School (CHS) website:

Since Columbine High School (CHS) opened in 1973, the school has established strong traditions and a culture of Rebel Pride. This pride is rooted in the fact that we are a close-knit family and community of learners. Columbine is committed to high standards of learning for all students, valuing each and every member of our school community. We expect personal and collective responsibility and promote high levels of engagement and performance in learning, which results in future life success.

To me, the BB&N message rings true because it explicitly integrates social-emotional learning (which is, after all, how people acquire languages) and authenticity. It sends the message that compassion and being human are more valuable in their school community than being smart.

The CHS message, by contrast, feels like it could have been written 50 years ago, focusing strictly on performance amid “school pride” (for those in the school’s inner circles blessed to have it) and other outdated institutional platitudes from days gone by.

I speak from personal experience. My four sons all attended Columbine at various points, and I am proud to say that not one of them graduated from there. In fact, my now 27 year-old Landen walked into the building on his first day as a freshman and had walked home by noon—a decision that had my full blessing.

The CHS statement: “…high levels of engagement and performance in learning…” strikes a false note with me. They don’t actually do that. How do I know? I previously led two intensive CI workshops for the 10-teacher WL team at CHS. Not a single one of them responded with the nuance or openness that Gregory Schwab and Sean Lawler did (from 46:00 to 61:00) on this recent episode of The CI Renaissance podcast, which passage you can listen to here:

https://grep.fm/e/206c0b516d5b4d2815e70cb170484666/

Reflecting on the DIA piece helps explain why my writing on language acquisition consistently attracts educators who care deeply about inclusion and SEL. You know… human beings.

When: 9:00 am to 11:00 am (MST)

Session: November/December 2026

Group Size: Limited to 20 people. First come, first served.

Materials: The Square book, The Poster Support Scripts Book, The CI Posters (all digital)

Tuition: $200. All materials included.

Secure Your Spot: https://www.benslavic.com/saturday-trainings/

Many teachers carry similar, unseen burdens, entirely unaware of how destructively these heavy boxes impact both their classrooms and their personal lives. Like the exhausted traveler, some educators are driven to the brink of burnout by these institutional or self-imposed weights, yet they feel powerless to set them down. They think, mistakenly, that good teaching means a lot of planning. God bless their weary hearts!

If only these teachers finally chose to leave these heavy boxes by the side of the road, their professional lives would transform. They would move through their careers with upright posture, clear eyes, a light stride, and a renewed sense of joy. Teaching would once again become a career they love—one where they can show up without rigid, over-engineered plans, engage in organic language creation alongside their students, and simply interact as genuine human beings.

Students are waiting—all of them—for authentic, engaging, and meaningful instruction in the target language. They are simply waiting for their teachers to realize that they are finally free to put the boxes down.

They have been waiting for a little dog, someone, anyone, to pull back the illusory curtain of how we learn languages, and to show them how to really do so, which is as easy as clicking one’s heals together and wishing for a story. Imagine that!

Here we CI teachers come, skipping with joy, finally solidly on the yellow brick road portions of our careers, revealing the gold, the pure gold, that gives the yellow color to the bricks. This is the CI road, and we invite all teachers to try a skip or two. You might like it! Better than monkeying around!

Related:

I love the one-word images! I'm still trying to figure out a way to incorporate them into our sadly grammar-based textbook class. But I think I might try this: we have the Imaginary Pet from [Grant] Boulanger... Maybe we could just dedicate a day to OWI and use our creation as our imaginary pet?? IDK. That way we can keep coming back to the creation; we'll have an excuse to NOT do the book for at least a day every other week or so... What think ye?

My thoughts:

Keep your vocabulary and objects ultra-simple (like a plate, spoon, or slice of pizza) because animals can get complicated. The key to this work is simplicity. Your artists must know how to keep their drawings simple, with bold black lines, and full of bright colors that fill the space. (All students with jobs need to know their responsibilities well; the class builds the image, not you.)

Don’t try to force a full hour of CI or One Word Images (OWIs) once a week right from the start. Instead, try wrapping up your regular lessons ten minutes early each day and saying, “We’re done for the day, so let’s just chat in [L2] for the rest of the time.” Then start an OWI as far as you can in the time you have and continue building it the next day at the end of class until its done.

Those ten minutes will quickly stretch to 15 and beyond as you see your students’ creativity take off. Just be prepared: as your results improve, you might face some pushback from traditional grammar teachers.

I don’t say that last sentence lightly. If you aren’t ready to deal with defensive colleagues, CI might not be for you. It’s more important to have a job than to teach well. The scrutiny from coworkers can be incredibly overwhelming for teachers new to CI. Your well-being and job security are far more important than aligning every lesson with the research and the Communication Standard.

The true challenge with CI is showing students how to become natural language acquirers, which requires breaking old habits. For years, classrooms have conditioned them to rely on their eyes and deliberate, conscious grammar logic and analysis. Asking them to suddenly switch to their ears and absorb spoken meaning unconsciously is a massive, uncomfortable shift for everyone.

Traditional grammar courses seldom require actual communication, leaving classmates unfamiliar with one another. Since OWIs depend on student rapport, actively building a community that is not based on memorization must be your first step.

Frequently refer back to your classroom posters to help students stay focused—particularly Posters 1 through 3. These core visuals establish the foundation for a respectful environment and help redirect highly talkative students, keeping you in charge.

Implementing One-Word Images (OWIs) effectively is more intricate than most people realize. When teachers attempt this activity without first preparing themselves and their students, it can fall flat. Unfortunately, many misattribute this failure to the Comprehensible Input (CI) methodology itself, causing them to retreat to the familiar routine of a textbook. In reality, mastering OWIs—and successfully leveraging them to later build narratives—requires a high level of skill. While some dismiss OWIs as the pedagogical equivalent of a simple children’s song, they are actually as complex and layered as a symphony.

I noticed you mentioned looking for an excuse not to use the book. Honestly, given how powerful Comprehensible Input is for language acquisition compared to traditional textbooks, you shouldn’t need an excuse at all! CI has a proven track record of success, whereas non-CI methods have struggled to produce results for decades. Are you - or is someone else - in charge of your career?

To truly master handling OWIs, I highly recommend attending one of my online Saturday training sessions. While I am not hosting any live classes at the moment, keep an eye out for future dates—they are the best way to learn. There is a vast amount of material to cover, and these live sessions are designed to perfectly complement and bring the concepts in my books to life.

Our next book for study is The Square.

Hi Ben,

Students love discovering—or reaffirming—their learning styles. What a fun way to start the year! I especially appreciate that they can take this information with them to other classes where their learning style may not match the teacher’s or the class’s approach. They now have a tool to better understand how they learn and can learn to adapt in order to be successful.

Thank you!!!

Blessings,

Kary

P.S. Here are some images from artist auditions last week:

To set myself up for success, I make it a priority to complete the Learning Styles Inventory before October. It serves as an incredible conversation starter. Personally, I cannot imagine navigating a parent meeting without a clear understanding of how their child learns and then sharing that with them, with the child taking the lead from the beginning of the meeting, to start it out on a positive note…

Identifying Learning Gaps

In our program, listening proficiency forms the foundation of most instruction through Level 2. When a student struggles with listening, it directly impacts their quiz grades during our Triangle, Square, and Star voyages.

When a student is genuinely trying—which is the most critical factor—but still failing to perform, I take a targeted approach:

• Gather Evidence: I pull and print their grades from the system to bring to the conference.

• Assess Pressure: If the student and parents feel overwhelmed by traditional testing or heavy memorization, I use the meeting to investigate the child’s learning history.

• Shift the Focus: With the parents’ and student’s alignment, I downplay the quiz grades. Instead, I focus heavily on their daily in-class effort and comprehension, exactly as described in Poster 3, the Class Communication Rubric.

The Impact of Targeted Accommodations

This strategy is designed exclusively for struggling but motivated students who are willing to work hard to understand my messages in class. Altering the focus keeps these students engaged in the program rather than losing them at the trimester or semester mark.

Most students do not need this grading accommodation and are well aware of it. Because they recognize their own capabilities, they do not resent a peer receiving extra help; in fact, they are usually happy to see their friends succeed. I utilize this intervention rarely, reserving it strictly to keep dedicated students in the program who would otherwise be pushed out.

When you accommodate students who give maximum effort but struggle with standard quizzes due to a different style of intelligence, you are practicing true, effective teaching.

As we get further into the school year, I’ll be sharing more articles focused on our deeply important fall parent-teacher conferences. After 24 years of teaching from a textbook, it is an absolute joy to finally tell parents the truth: their children aren’t bad at languages. In fact, they are incredibly talented, brilliant, and wonderful language learners.

I was so excited about launching The Triangle (our brand-new elementary CI curriculum) that I briefly forgot about The Square for middle school. Ines caught me up and shared a few things from The Square that is going to help her ace the start of the school year:

Hey Ben!

I hope you’re enjoying your summer! Mine has been great - spent some time in California, some time here in NY, got in a little more beach time, and now I’m grounding myself at home with lots of dancing, drumming, and family time.

Today I sat down to “plan,” which meant finally reading the Square, and I think it’s the perfect “prequel” to the Triangle for me. It will give me a chance to really get the ABCs into my “teaching body”, and I know it will take practice to master. This is what I use to remember this important aspect of our Saturday trainings last spring:

A = the first thing you need to know (the meaning of the word)

B = Boca (mouth), getting the word into the mouth and saying it in different ways (which will also get it into the ears)

C = Cuerpo (body), getting the word into the body through a simple gesture.

This is embedded with techniques like WBYT, “How can we remember….?”, “Jack” in the back, Profe 2, among others that I need to practice and master.

I will start with the Square in the second week of school, and once I am comfortable with these techniques, I will expand into OWIs from the Triangle, which, in turn, require additional techniques. Once I have mastered those, I will move on to the Star 1 and Star 2 (not necessarily in that order…).

By the time I am ready to begin using your methods in my doctoral research in two or so years, I will have ample experience and will represent them well. I promise.

Supplement 1: The Learning Styles Inventory

It is generally accepted in education today that people’s learning styles tend to be either visual, auditory or tactile/kinesthetic. There are other models, but this is the basic model. Some students exhibit balanced combinations of two or even all three of the learning styles; others are heavily “weighted” to one style.

Once we have discussed these learning styles with our students in class, and identified how each of them learns, we can then build a stronger classroom community during the class discussion about our students’ learning styles. Light bulbs will turn on in their minds about how they learn.

How all that works is the subject of this supplement.

Listening is the Bedrock

My heart goes out to those students whose learning style is predominantly visual but who are in a language classroom that is properly aligned with the Communication Standard and the research – an auditory classroom.

Why is this? It is because languages are acquired via listening, and so the visually dominant students are at a disadvantage. They don’t expect to be in a class that requires them to change from a visual to an auditory mindset, since almost all of the classes they have taken before have required only that they interact visually with the course material.

In language classrooms, the skills other than listening – reading, writing, and speaking – all emerge from listening. Listening is the starting point; it is the bedrock of all language learning.

Not surprisingly, students whose learning style is predominantly visual, when given worksheets in a language class, prefer them. But auditory and tactile kids, when given the same worksheets, feel defeated. Some rebel, causing classroom management problems. Visual language students in a traditional textbook-based language classroom, however, don’t have to change – the worksheets save them.

Many language teachers learned the language visually themselves, excelling at work sheets, and it is natural that they would want to teach that way and so their students “learn” visually and the beat goes on. No blame on those teachers, at least until they figure out by educating themselves about the research that human beings don’t learn languages visually.

I defend the right of teachers to teach as they see fit, except when it comes at the expense of children.

All this probably accounts for at least some of the heavy resistance we get when we choose to teach using a curriculum that is based on listening.

You must level with your students. Tell them in the first days of class that the first and most important thing that they will have to do in your class is to learn how to listen, and that their grade in the class will reflect how well they do that. That is what the posters and the poster support scripts are all about.

You give the students the learning styles inventory so that they can understand how their own individual learning style will interface with the auditory way in which you will be teaching them that year. It involves no less than teaching to an entirely different part of their brains, and the visual and kinesthetic/tactile kids have to be made to reflect on that fact and adjust if they are going to enjoy success in your classroom.

Training Them

Discuss the three learning styles with your students before they actually fill out their inventory. Make sure that they understand the following points:

1. Generally, one out of every three people in any population is either dominantly visual, auditory or tactile.

2. Visual learners prefer to process information logically by reading and writing. They prefer visual tasks in school.

3. Auditory learners often don’t feel comfortable in school environments. They prefer to learn through their ears. Except for your class and maybe a music class, there aren’t too many auditory classes for them to take in school.

4. Tactile/kinesthetic learners prefer to work with their hands and do things that involve moving their bodies or manipulating things. They have a hard time with the visual learning that is almost always going on around them in the school setting. Tactile learners become auto mechanics, surgeons and people who build things with their hands, etc. This means that while they are in school, where everything is so visual, it is not always a good “fit” for them. This discussion whets their appetite. They want to know what kind of learner they are.

Getting Started

First, you need an inventory. You can find them online. Many inventories provide actual percentile scores which indicate how heavily a student’s learning style is weighted in one area or another. That is what you want. Don’t use an inventory that simply states what your predominant learning style is without providing numbers.

I recommend this inventory. It is fast and easy to use and it gives percentages:

http://www.educationplanner.org/students/self-assessments/learning-styles-quiz.shtml?event=results&A=9&V=6&T=5

Inventories that give percentage scores may reveal that a certain student has, for example, a visual score of 25%, an auditory score of 45% and a tactile/kinesthetic score of 30%. Obviously, this is a student who would not be a big fan of worksheets.

Another student may have a visual score of 55%, an auditory score of 20% and a tactile/kinesthetic score of 25%. This kid could do worksheets all day and ask for some extra ones for something to do that evening, but would probably resist everything you said in class about how we learn languages through our ears.

This raises an interesting point. I used to interpret resistance from my students personally, thinking that they just didn’t like my instruction. In the light of the information provided by the inventory, however, we can see that such reactions from students may have less to do with our instruction and more to do with how they learn.

Further reflection about our students’ learning styles might also reveal to us that our students’ perceived learning styles, having been influenced by the mostly visual nature of how we educate our students in middle and high schools, may not even be an accurate picture of how those students actually learn. Why?

If a child has experienced learning through textbooks, and little else, they may have actually had their natural learning style beaten out of them by the highly visual textbooks and worksheets and the testing industry that are firmly in place today.

A strong auditory or tactile learner in such a visual setting may simply think that they aren’t very smart. This is an unfortunate result of testing that we can nevertheless do something about by looking at the way we present our subject matter to our students. We should remember that our underlying purpose as teachers should have less to do with merely teaching them a language, but should rather convey to them hope that they can succeed in life and that they are good at things.

A student who tests out with a visual score of 20%, an auditory score of 35% and a tactile score of 45% is going to be a challenge for us in the sense that such tactile learners probably come to our classrooms with deep self-doubt about their abilities to learn anything.

An honest discussion with our classes in general about learning styles can help some of our kids muster up the courage to learn in an auditory way, even if their preferred learning style is not auditory. This gives hope to such kids. Moreover, when students know that their learning style naturally conflicts with our teaching style, but that we know and care about that, and have expressed to them that we are on their side, it makes a big difference.

Processing the Results

Once the inventories have been completed, open up the floor for discussion. The way you lead the discussion is important. Here are some general guidelines:

1. Students who test high in the auditory category should feel supported, but not praised. They still have to work hard in your class. (See the metacognition poster on Rigor for the details.)

2. Students who do not test high in the auditory category should not be made to feel that they are at a disadvantage in your class. They must be made to see it as a challenge, and they must absolutely be reassured that you will make yourself clear to all of them when speaking the language in class, no matter what their learning style.

3. You must make it clear to all of your students that they still have to work hard in class to get high grades. I can remember many visual students whose hard work to learn through their ears in my classroom had far more value to them than their having the “right” learning style.

The more vocal kids are going to want to call out their numbers at this point, but don’t let them. Why?

Try to guess their numbers yourself. Turn it into a guessing game. They love this. If you are wrong, they especially love it. But if you get lucky and are right, they tend to believe in the inventory more and so take your message about learning styles more seriously.

Actually, if you wait long enough to give the inventory, at least until enough weeks have passed by for you to observe how each of them learns, you can guess their learning style with surprising accuracy.

Given enough lead time, I have been sometimes been able to guess the exact score of certain students, to their delight and my own.

How does this guessing-game work? Look at the student whose score you are guessing, put your hand on your chin, look up at the ceiling and say, for example, “OK, Sarah, you scored a 25% on visual, a 30% on auditory and a 45% on tactile”. You would obviously choose numbers like these if the child is a tactile learner from what you’ve observed so far from them in class. How does this affect Sarah? For one thing, Sarah and how she learns becomes the subject of class discussion – the message is that she is an important part of the classroom community. Secondly, other students start to see her fidgety behavior in class as just the way she learns and not as something “bad”.

Fellow students who may have been judging Sarah might pause and reflect about that, maybe feeling some compassion and even developing some empathy. When they start to see that all people don’t learn in the same way, your students may also begin to understand that not all of their school experiences should be about staring at and memorizing, and that maybe that’s not the way things should go in all aspects of their educations. This brings hope to some of them.

Once you have guessed Sarah’s scores, follow up with a frank explanation of them to her, privately if she is shy or in front of the class if she is ok with that.

This might require you to say something like this:

“Sarah, did you know that people who learn by working with their hands are needed in society? Tactile learners become surgeons or mechanics or servers or cabinet makers or other things like that that play very important roles in our society.”

But then you can add, after first making the compliment: “Now in my class the way you succeed is by listening, as we’ve discussed before. So, your challenge in this class this year will be to try to maybe increase your auditory score in my class. Maybe we’ll take another inventory in the spring to see if anything has changed in any of your scores.”

What to tell a predominantly visual learner? Something like this:

“Those of you who tested as visual learners learn more with your eyes and this class is more about learning with your ears. So, this class might be more of a challenge for you. One thing I can say is that I always try to make myself clear to all of my students. You will see me working hard to do that. So even though you may be a visual learner, I will guarantee that you will understand, but only as long as you do your part and try to understand as well. It’s what I do – I make myself understandable to my students when I speak [name of language you teach]. Therefore, we will work together to make sure that you do well in my class. That’s my promise.”

With one super auditory learner, I did this. I looked right at her and said, “Your visual score is 20%.” I was right and immediately everybody wanted me to guess their scores. The hardest ones to guess are the auditory and tactile learners, because those are the students who have learned to hide how they learn. That’s not good for the student and it’s not good for schools, to make everybody learn in the same way.

What is your message to your students here? It is that, although you respect how each one learns, you also expect them to respect how you teach. Making them understand that is important in helping them adjust their learning style to your teaching style.

If, as a result of doing the learning styles inventory, a child or a parent go to the admin team to try to get you to differentiate your instruction in favor of the student’s learning style, refuse. You have to make it clear to all concerned that you will not teach in a way that goes against what the research clearly says, that people learn languages by listening to them and understanding them.

It happens that certain visually dominant learners - some of whom may have already complained to their parents about how you teach differently – whine enough to cause their uninformed helicopter parents to go ballistic. This is when you must stand firm – that your use of auditory methods is not negotiable in your classroom because it fully aligns with the research. Use the metacognition posters to explain to such parents how and why you teach in the way you do.

The message arrives to the students and any concerned parents within a context of what is best for the class and not what is best for any one student who happens to be good at doing worksheets and who thinks that - because they dominate their other classes as good memorizers – they get to dominate your class as well.

That, by the way, is a very poor message to send to students about life, that only certain kinds of people get to win and that the world must change to accommodate their preferences. And yet, it is a message that some teachers send out on a daily basis to our students, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

We can always get to know our kids better. They are so good at hiding behind their faces. But, by devoting a few classes to the Learning Styles Inventory at the beginning of the year and also by referring to the metacognition posters, things do begin to change.

Make good decisions about discussing the learning styles of any students who are not yet ready to have a discussion about how they learn in front of the class. Wait. They’re listening. They will come around.

This is a time when you can communicate important points to them, like these:

The students with high visual scores can understand why they may process your speech slower than others in class.

The faster (more auditory) processors in your classroom get to occupy a spotlight that in most of their other classes has been denied to them by the visual learners. This is good for those kids. Students with high tactile scores are relieved to know that there is nothing wrong with them and that their squirminess can be explained by their natural learning style and not by the fact that there is “something wrong” with them.

After your students have taken the inventory, the main point to stress with them is that even if their visual or tactile learning style conflicts with your auditory teaching style, they can adapt. They can get better at listening because of your promise to make your speech completely understandable to them and to give them only simple quizzes that are easy to pass if they just come to class with the intent to understand.

Make learning into a fun game and make them understand fully that you are going to do all you can to make yourself understood by them.

Tell all of them – regardless of their learning style – that all they have to do is to try to understand your words and that if they just do that one thing you will make sure that they get either an A or a B in your class, because they are trying, but that in fact you can see via their observable non-verbal behaviors that they are in fact trying.

The key lies with you. You absolutely must develop in your teaching properly-paced, very slow speech. If you can make yourself understood, they can succeed. The day is fast approaching when language teachers can no longer sashay into the teachers’ lounge and gripe about how certain of their students are lazy.

It is very important that each child in your class who is not an auditory learner knows that the reason they may feel uncomfortable is NOT because they can’t learn as well as the auditory learners, but because they simply haven’t yet found the “right part of their brain”. Challenge them to do that.

When they know what the challenge is, they respond. The challenge in language instruction is to build a communicative bridge with our students, one that has its foundations in interesting and understandable messages, where the focus is 100% on meaning and 0% on memorization.

Other Points

Some other points to reflect on about the learning styles inventories:

1. You can learn lots of valuable information about your class makeup when you do this. In one small class of about 15 students made up largely of boys, fully 70% tested as tactile, but only two of them presented that way in class. The others had learned to quell their need to fidget either through self-discipline or it was done pharmaceutically. So, when you at least acknowledge such things in class, it is huge for kids. They want to learn more about how they learn and it is important to them that you care about their success in your class. They begin to see you as an ally.

Greater appreciation of students who are different in any way occurs. In one case, one of the best students in all of my classes – at the time I found this out – was failing many of her other classes. She was not a visual learner and looked different and had more or less given up in school. But when we bridged the topic of how great she was doing in my class, and how it was connected to her learning style, the look on her face and on the faces of the others in class was worth becoming a teacher for. The kids came to a greater appreciation of the fact that not all students – and their teachers – learn and teach in the same way. Her face shone with pride as she was finally recognized for something that she was good at.

Because of the inventory, she understood that she was not stupid in her other classes, countering a message that she had received for years from visual teachers who required large amounts of memorization in the visual learning environments that we call schools. The biggest outcome of this new knowledge for this child, however, was that she became a truly outstanding artist in the class that year. We turned an excluded student into a star and it started with the learning styles inventory.

When I see a student who doesn’t understand me in class, I make eye contact with them and maybe whisper in English something reminding them that they are a visual learner stuck in my auditory environment. Empathy from their teacher helps them put things into perspective. It builds a bridge between you and the student. And of course - and this is so very critical - I did my part of slowing down my speech, because it’s a two-way street.

Doing the inventory helps remove any personal resentment that the visual learners might have towards me up to that point in the year, as they come to understand that it isn’t me who is trying to hamper them, but how they process information.

It is a great thing to have the results of these inventories next to my printed grades for parent conferences, because it plays a big role in taking away any oppositional energy that the parent might have towards me. In a parent meeting, as soon as I say in a lighthearted way with a big smile on my face something like, “So, your child is a visual learner who finds herself in an auditory environment!” It’s a good conversation starter for a parent conference. The parent sees that we actually know something about her child and the conference becomes not just a reporting of grades but a shared experience of exploring ways to actually help the child perform better in the class.

6. If the parent is one who seems to know more than you about teaching languages, at that point you can go right to your two big ACTFL guns: (1) that the standard in WL education is Communication and (2) that 50 years of research in the field state that people acquire languages primarily by listening to and understanding messages. You can also throw into the mix the position statement of your national parent organization (ACTFL) that suggests that you speak the language in your classroom up to 90% of the time. It’s best to say to doubting parents outright that in order to keep your job you have to follow the dictates of ACTFL and that your class is simply going to require that her child learn in a different way from the way she learns in her other classes.

As mentioned, discussing the learning style inventories with the kids as a class activity also serves as a community-building activity. Often after just a few days of discussing the inventories, you will become aware of a sense of trust developing within the class. And kids need to trust that their teachers have their best interests at heart, while also knowing each other better in their classes. It helps everything.

A final word of advice on the inventories: don’t try to get to them all in a few days. Give yourself enough time to discuss each child, and avoid certain kids. It is worth noting also, and most teachers already know this, especially in today’s learning environment, that they should avoid going too deep with the kids either. This is not therapy. The moment the discussion becomes personal about the child and their experience in school, stop the discussion and move to another inventory or back into the safety of a Square activity. Once you have identified and discussed the learning style of a student, do not expand on it. Keep everything simple and brief and above board. Keep the discussion to how the various learning styles impact their responses to your language instruction.

If you have the metacognition posters, you will probably use them quite often as you take the kids through the learning styles discussions.

Learning styles inventories are a superior way to build community at the start of the year. On this subject, Kary Fernandez wrote to me a few days ago:

Hi Ben,

Students love discovering—or reaffirming—their learning styles. What a fun way to start the year! I especially appreciate that they can take this information with them to other classes where their learning style may not match the teacher’s or the class’s approach. They now have a tool to better understand how they learn and can learn to adapt in order to be successful.

Thank you!!!

Blessings,

Kary

Early in my career, I operated under a flawed assumption: that teaching meant rushing to cover every piece of material, leaving only the “smartest” students to keep up. I was simply replicating the high-pressure environment of my own schooling. Today, I deeply regret that approach. It directly contradicts everything we know about language acquisition. Unlike abstract fields like physics or advanced calculus, every single person in the world is biologically wired to acquire language. Research proves that we master languages naturally when we focus on understanding meaningful messages, not by rushing through content. We were conditioned in school to believe that reading speed was everything, but speed should not be our goal. Just as we wouldn’t rush through a fine meal, we shouldn’t sprint through our curriculum. I regret that early sense of urgency. It is time to ask ourselves: when are we going to slow down? We gain nothing but burnout by trying to maintain a stressful, micromanaged grip on our classrooms.

Those who defend CI should try to make it clear, when they talk to teachers whose professional experience has been based on the concept of teaching grammar from a textbook, that when we speak the language properly to our students, we are teaching the best form of grammar. Grammar and CI are one and the same.

Now, if a teacher wants, like me, to show off how great they are at discrete grammar*, they can get into that after level 2. Then the grammar nerds still left at level 3 can have their time in the sun. But don’t teach that old textbook kind of grammar in levels 1 and 2. Don’t waste your time. Teach them real grammar: properly spoken speech and properly written language in the form of CI.

You may get a few parents upset because you are not teaching them how to conjugate verbs. Then you have to explain to them that the best and fastest way to teach grammar is to speak correctly to their kids in the TL. If they don’t understand that, and you capitulate to their demands or to the demands of your dinosaur WL colleagues down the hallway, then you are a coward.

*I asked AI how they defined discrete grammar, and they told me this:

Discrete grammar (often referred to in the context of discrete-point grammar or discrete items) is an approach to language study, teaching, and testing that breaks language down into separate, individual, and isolated rules or elements.

Instead of looking at language as a whole continuous stream of communication, discrete grammar treats elements like verb tenses, prepositions, or plural endings as distinct, countable units that can be studied and tested one by one.

Key Features of Discrete Grammar

• Isolation: It studies a single grammatical structure by itself, removed from a natural conversation or larger text context.

• Focused Testing: Tests using this approach feature multiple-choice questions or fill-in-the-blanks where each question targets only one specific rule (such as choosing between “goes,” “go,” or “going” for a single tense).

• Measurable Accuracy: It allows teachers to precisely pinpoint a student’s exact strengths and weaknesses regarding specific mechanical rules.

Contrast with Integrative Approaches

While discrete grammar looks at small parts in isolation, the opposite approach—integrative language learning—requires learners to combine grammar, vocabulary, listening, and speaking together in real-world communicative tasks. Many educators note that while discrete grammar helps build foundational accuracy, students also need integrated practice to use the language fluently.

It is a common pain point for CI educators. When language acquisition feels natural, students—especially high-achieving ones or native speakers—equate “easy” with “not learning.” They expect the traditional, clunky architecture of school: syllabi, grammar timelines, vocabulary lists, and homework. If they aren’t struggling, they assume they aren’t progressing.

Here is my opinion on why this happens, included here hoping against hope that some of us might be able to reframe the narrative for our students, parents, and colleagues.

1. The Real Content is the Language

In a CI classroom, the curriculum is the language itself, not a textbook chapter. The content is simply the vehicle for the message.

Our job is to deliver interesting, meaningful messages that students understand. When students listen to and read these messages, their minds do the heavy lifting (Harrell) behind the scenes. According to Noam Chomsky’s theory of the Language Acquisition Device (LAD), the brain automatically organizes grammar and structure during sleep. To expect a language class to mimic a history or science class misses the mechanics of how the human brain actually processes speech.

2. The Illusion of the “Hard Work” Textbook

From the early 1970s and even before (particularly Simon Belasco) language experts like Stephen Krashen and Beniko Mason confirm a liberating truth for teachers: language acquisition thrives on compelling, comprehensible interaction, not forced labor. No less than the visionary CI German teacher Robert Harrell in Los Angeles has made this point over and over, as per the discussion of his trailer image in the past few days here.

Yet, the vast majority of educators still cling to the old way. They believe teaching requires:

• Layering strict grammatical levels

• Presenting rigid vocabulary matrices

• Adhering to arbitrary textbook timelines

• Assigning compliance-based homework

This isn’t just exhausting; it is ineffective. Teachers wear themselves out planning complex lessons when they could simply talk with their students using natural, proper grammar. The student begging for a complex syllabus has just been conditioned to believe that learning must feel painful to count.

3. The Challenge of Native Speakers

This “too easy” misconception multiplies when you have native or heritage speakers in the room—a topic that Nikki directly addressed in her own recent PD for her Columbus WL colleagues last week.

Native speakers often thrive in a CI environment because it mirrors how they acquired the language at home: through messages, stories, and connection. However, because they aren’t filling out verb charts, they may feel under-challenged by traditional academic metrics.

The strategy here is not to give them “harder” grammar, but deeper, more compelling messages. Shift their focus from analyzing the language to engaging with richer cultural, historical, or literary narratives. I have addressed how to deal with native speakers (they should never be allowed in our classrooms) at length in the Star 1 book.

The Bottom Line

When a student asks for “new content,” they are really asking for the familiar discomfort of traditional schooling. They think they need a map, but what they actually need is to just keep driving down the road towards fluency.

If they understand the message, they are acquiring the language. It is that simple. We don’t need to work harder to make language complex; we just need to keep it interesting.

This realization explains why Comprehensible Input (CI) struggles to gain traction in these environments. Within these departments, CI is often treated as a passing trend rather than a pedagogical shift. Traditional programs anticipate that the “fad” will fade, allowing them to return to lucrative memorization and standardized testing models.

However, CI is not a fad; it directly aligns with second-language acquisition research and perfectly embodies the ACTFL Communication Standard, particularly the Interpersonal Mode. Ultimately, culture informs curriculum, not the other way around. When a department’s culture relies entirely on a textbook, that becomes their unyielding curriculum. It is simply “the way things are done,” leaving little room for institutional change.

While driving to the hardware store early this morning, I had to pass the school entrance to Columbine HS—the only exit from my neighborhood—and realized it was the first day of school. I immediately said a brief prayer of thanks to God for seeing me through 41 first days back of my own. Now at my computer, I want to ask you, my readers, to join me in praying for the protection of everyone in that building.

It deeply concerns me that the culture at CHS has not truly changed since the 1999 shootings. Everyone knows that. Then again, perhaps finding a way to fix education ourselves is now officially beyond human reach, and high school teachers might understand this best. Ultimately, the most powerful and meaningful thing we can do now is turn to prayer.

Rigor

The Triangle approach addresses the misconception surrounding educational rigor. Some educators argue that input-based language teaching makes learning too effortless, leading to artificially high success rates and inflated grades. This philosophical divide became apparent when I was called into a formal meeting with ten high school world language teachers. They expressed concern that my students transitioning from middle school "did not know" how to conjugate verbs. While the students could accurately understand verbs in context, they could not reproduce traditional conjugation charts. For those teachers, mastery was strictly defined by explicit, written production rather than contextual comprehension.

Also, their incoming 9th graders were happy and confident language learners. That didn’t go over too well with these teachers, who had apparently forgotten how easy it was for they themselves to acquire their first languages via nothing more than comprehensible input. They must still think that language acquisition must be “rigorous”.

But the master German teacher Robert Harrell in Los Angeles has said that we need to distinguish between true rigor vs. rigor as work that is “onerous” or “burdensome”. Harrell asks if doing more worksheets and thinking about how the language is built in class is actually rigorous or just means more work. He asks if 40 math problems that practice the same concept is twice as rigorous as 20, or just more work.

According to the US Department of Eduction, rigor includes a “sustained focus, depth and integrity of inquiry, suspension of premature conclusions, and a continual testing of hypotheses”. Students in a tableau or storytelling classroom are exposed to this healthy kind of rigor, not the onerous kind. Rigor as sustained focus on messages is enjoyable, not onerous.

The Interpersonal Mode of Communication, the central mode of ACTFL’s Three Modes of Communication, requires students to maintain a sustained focus on the meaning of what is being said with no zoning out and side conversations. Grammar is not brought into that formula as part of the pedagogical efforts made by the teacher in class. The teaching of grammar as a pedagogical concept is not part of CI.

Rather, correct grammar (proper speech in the form of CI) is delivered on a silver platter to our students when they attend to our rich spoken input throughout class. It’s how we learned correct grammar in our first lnguage; it “sounded right”. Rigor is about focusing on the language’s meaning, not on how it is built. It’s extremely frustrating to me that most language teachers claiming to do CI don’t know that. I see them as misinformed at best, and as pompous and ineffective at worst, teachers who make kids (who are naturally wired to acquire languages given enough CI) feel that they suck at languages, which just isn’t true.

So, let’s go back to our definition of rigor. Anyone who has seen a trained tableau or storytelling teacher in action in their classroom has witnessed “sustained focus” in the students.

Moreover, in this work we can see a “continual testing of hypotheses”, but in a clever twist the students are not even aware that they are doing that, because that continual “testing” is occurring at an unconscious level in the students’ minds during class. Their deeper minds, as per Robert’s trailer image, organize and test facts about the language effortlessly because the bigger truck pulling the “language trailer” has a big enough engine and does all the work unconsciously and easily, as Robert explains in the next section below.

In truth, what is happening is far too complex for the students’ conscious minds to grasp and can only happen in the deeper mind, which is the only part of the brain that is properly wired for that kind of heavy lifting. 50 years of research has proven that, so why don’t teachers read it? I simply don’t know. I do know what if it had anything to do with our national defense and missile-building capacities, it would not be permitted by the professionals involved.

What about the “suspension of premature conclusions” in the students’ minds during class? As students are exposed to the language in a contextualized, meaningful fashion, they suspend conclusions about how the language functions rather than having those conclusions grammatically forced upon them at the outset. The conclusions are all tested and drawn during sleep, in fact. If that is true, and it is, then why do teachers continuously and repeatedly ignore that fact? They are the cause of their own boring classes, and eventually, when the CI tsunami makes contact with the shore, they will be quickly hors service.

At some point certain students do become interested in the grammar. But such instruction about the mechanical aspects of the language, how it “works”, is best done when the questions arise, which is usually not before level 3. The unconscious brain is continuously testing the students’ hypotheses about what sounds correct in the language, and it is during this unconscious process that the language system is built. We know that this is true because this is what happens with very small children, just as the research shows that it happens.

Find more information on Rigor to project and share with your students in the set of Star posters, which when on your classroom walls is a great way to truly impress visitors. When kids know the points made in those powerful posters well enough to even explain them during class to visitors, you really impress your admin teams because during their visits they see students who are not just engaged but can proudly explain to visitors why they are engaged.

Trailer Image

So why does all this complex deep mental activity of actual acquisition of the language (vs. memorization for tests) seem so easy in class? It’s a fascinating question.

There is this great image from Robert Harrell: Imagine you have a travel trailer that you want to take on vacation. Since all you have is a small four-cylinder car, you hitch the trailer to it and take off. Your car will strain to pull it and probably break down as a result.

Your neighbor comes along with his large V-8 pickup truck; you hitch the travel trailer to the pickup and take off. No strain; the big pickup handles the load with ease. What’s the difference? Did your travel trailer suddenly become lighter? Is the work any easier? No. You simply got the right equipment for the job.

That’s the difference between learning a language from a textbook and acquiring a language from a human being who has worked hard to learn how to make the class interesting in the unconscious ways described earlier in this book.

Learning from a WL textbook only accesses the conscious mind, which is not designed for languages. This way of teaching accesses the unconscious mind, which is powerfully designed to acquire languages.

Acquiring a language is hard work, always has been, and always will be. It just seems easy when you use the right equipment, the equipment specifically designed for the job, the unconscious mind.

Kids find focusing on an interesting message easy, while they find verb conjugation difficult and boring. The first happens because of the powerful force that is the unconscious mind ; the second is about memorization, which is like pissing in the ocean in our field.

Interpersonal communication is when two or more people exchange information and language with each other and have the opportunity to clarify, negotiate meaning, express lack of understanding, love and laugh with each other, etc.

The input skills of listening and reading set up the output skills and that process requires years. That input forms the foundation for the eventual authentic expression of the language as output in the form of writing and speaking.

As we slowly rid ourselves of the old ideas of how a teacher functions in class and what a language teacher even is, many of us are learning new and wonderful things these days about how we want to be in our classrooms. We want our work to be easy and natural and fun! We also don’t want to burn out, since burnt out teachers can’t be of much use to their students nor to their loved ones.

Nothing counts more in language teaching than providing understandable speech input to our students. All the testing we do, especially, has little value, because what is being measured by the test is happening in a part of the brain that is completely impossible to measure! It does, however, serve the interests of the powerful corporate testing industry, and maybe that’s what George W. Buch had in mind when he fast-tracked testing in our schools.

CI is like when it rains, the rain causes things to grow but we don’t notice it. We give our students enough listening input, and then the reading ability just happens, being based on massive unconscious neurological activity linked to sound that does not show up in our conscious awareness.

And so what we thought was an impossible and emotionally grating task – teaching another language – suddenly becomes a very do-able and even enjoyable one, one that is certainly vastly different from what we used to think language teaching was all about, as we go forward now in hope and optimism in the knowledge that teaching in this way holds the key to a long and satisfying career of having fun and laughter and joy.

Input vs. Output

We have already stated that for authentic output in the form of writing or speech to occur, we must allow it to emerge naturally at its own time in its own way after massive amounts of input. Asking students to write and speak (output) before they have listened and read enough (input) erodes the kids’ confidence in themselves.

The term is not comprehensible output for a reason. We need to slow down on the output piece.

Many language teachers are still pedagogically way off on that one.

We don’t forbid output in this kind of language instruction. We just don’t force it. It emerges earlier in some students, later in others. But we don’t force it. Skill building of any kind does not lead to communication. All this is consistent with what we know about learning. Stephen Camarata (“The Intuitive Parent”) has a great deal to say about the need to have holistic learning and three-dimensional experiences with language in order for speech to develop. So do Vygotsky and Krashen and Beniko Mason and all the other great researchers who are recognized as great for a reason. When my students have had sufficient hours of language exposure (many thousands – far more than I could possibly give them in, for example, a four-year high school program), then of course they should be able to “workshop their writing” or do projects that “show what they know”. But according to the best research we have, those thousands and thousands of hours of listening and reading input have to happen first.

While second-language acquisition generally happens at a faster rate than first-language acquisition (due to non- linguistic factors such as motor-skill development, brain development, experience, etc.), first-year middle or high school students are still linguistic toddlers.

The research has shown different numbers, but it is generally accepted that authentic output requires many thousands of hours of understandable input in the form of listening and reading in order to bear the fruit that we call speech and writing. An accepted number in the research to gain minimal mastery is from 8,000-10,000 hours for modern languages and 24,000 hours for languages like Mandarin.

Yet, how many available instructional minutes do we have in a four-year high school program?

Roughly 500 hours total from bell to bell over the four years? That’s 1/20th or only 5% of the time we need even if we use every minute available to us. For Mandarin it is only 2% of the time needed.

Those staggering figures should influence how we think about our teaching. We have but a fraction of the time we need! Clearly, even when we spend basically all of our instructional minutes in the target language, it’s not enough.

The obvious conclusion is that we should teach not as if our hair is on fire, but in a calm way that only invites our students to want to go further in the language, to make it a pleasant life-long endeavor, while we keep our sanity and enjoy our jobs.

What Should a CI Classroom Look Like?

So, what should a language classroom look like? Well, as with any method, strategy or approach, a CI classroom will look different for each teacher. But there are some common things to look for as well:

1. The teacher encourages the students from the beginning to just listen to the target language

during class.

2. The teacher and students engage in a conversation or dialogue in the target language.

3. The teacher checks for comprehension regularly through the eyes.

4. Laughter and smiles happen frequently in our classrooms.

5. The teacher encourages but does not force students to express themselves in the target language.

6. The teacher shelters vocabulary but not grammar (grammar is contextualized and embedded in the language, and not something separate).

7. The teacher works with drawings created by students to keep the class student-centered.

8. The teacher incorporates rigor in the classroom by requiring sustained focus from students.

9. The teacher and students develop a positive relationship with one another.

10. There is equity and inclusion.

11. The students are visibly engaged in class.

SLOW in This Approach

Another most important point to make about the research is that our speech, to be understood, relies on the rate of speaking we use with our students. We must speak slowly if want to communicate with our students in our classrooms.

Studies give slightly varying rates, but the conclusion is the same: adults speak too rapidly for children – even high school students – to understand fully. And this is in the native language.

The average adult speaks at about 170+ words per minute with many adults speaking faster than 200 words per minute in conversation or when feeling hurried. Oral reading speed is slightly slower, but not much.

The average 5 to 7-year-old understands at about 120 words per minute in her native language.

Even high school students average about 140 words per minute in comprehension. That’s still only about 75% of what is being said in L1. Imagine trying to understand a new math concept when you

can comprehend only 75% of what is being said in your native language. The problem compounds exponentially for second language learners.

Mr. Rogers was loved by children in part because they could understand everything that he said: he consciously spoke at only about 124 words per minute.

If all of this is true for students in their native language, imagine how much more difficult it is for students in a second language. When we learn to speak SLOWLY enough, our students can understand, and they feel secure.

Add to that an accepting and supportive attitude on the part of the teacher, and you have a combination that the student almost never encounters in a school setting – slow instruction that is easy to follow in a loving and supportive environment. What a difference that can make in a student’s day!

Hmmm… maybe all teachers should spend some time in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Let’s wrap up this discussion on SLOW by saying that the single most important element in language acquisition happens at the unconscious level of our students’ minds so that there is nothing we can “teach” them about the language other than speaking to them the target language in ways that they can understand, which means SLOWLY.

(Note: the numbers above taken from an article entitled Speech Rates in the Wichita Eagle, 2008.)

However, I strongly oppose using commercial chapter books in Level 1 CI classes. While this stance frustrates the lucrative industry behind these materials—leading some creators to ambush me during webinars—the CI community continues to push them.

In my view, providing prefabricated reading materials to Level 1 students is a mistake. At this stage, students should exclusively read content derived directly from their own co-created narratives, such as the material generated in Phase 1 of the Star curriculum and utilized in Phases 3 and 4. These commercial chapter books belong strictly in Level 2.

Why do CI teachers rely so heavily on chapter books in Level 1? Often, it stems from a lack of confidence in their own ability to spontaneously co-create a story or One-Word Image (OWI) in happy interplay with their classes. But shifting to books too early is a major misstep. Level 1 should focus entirely on building engaging spoken narratives, gradually shifting the balance until Level 4, which should be predominantly reading-based. This progression is precisely how the Star Model is designed to work.

Focus on one really wacky characteristic of the main character, one that ties in with the theme of the story, if possible. Funny things on the board soon re-energize things.

Another good way to re-energize a story is to immediately switch away from event description to dialogue. One character wants their way and the other actors help or don’t help. Switching to output in this way seems to crystallize interest in a very strong way. Of course, this all happens in Phase 1.

Besides re-energizing the story, dialogues are also chances to get a chant going (I want my money!), not to mention a chance to bring in strong emotions (I want my money! said in anger, while pouting, romantically, etc.). Just remember to keep these dialogues short.

Of course, the best way to react to fading interest is to stay in the moments of fear, keep asking questions, and let the kids’ cute answers save the day. Or you can stop the story (or one word image) and agree with them that the story sucks and start another one. They never mind, because they are having fun focusing unconsciously on interesting messages and not consciously thinking about how the language is built (the old way of teaching a language).