Back-To-School World Language Teacher Summit 2026
36 Sessions & 20 PD Hours
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Back-To-School World Language Teacher Summit 2026
7 Lessons
8 Lessons
This session reframes the bell ringer problem: teachers don't lack ideas—they're exhausted by deciding how to start class every day. Jessica Hall (Miss Señorita) shares a repeatable system with three formats (matching, fill-in-the-blank, and categories) that works for nearly any vocabulary, grammar, or level. Participants leave with a simple 10-minute routine, common pitfalls to avoid, and two free first-week lesson plans for Spanish 1 and 2.
This session shows how to turn bell ringers into engaging routines that involve every student. Courtney Bonino (Learning Llama) shares four formats: relationship builders, culture builders, connection builders, and energy builders. Teachers learn how to match each routine to their style, adapt it for all proficiency levels, build lasting habits, and ensure accountability without grading everything. Free bell ringer resources are included.
This session shows how to weave authentic culture into daily routines instead of treating it as an extra lesson. Allison Wienhold (Mis Clases Locas) shares ready-to-use routines, from calendar talk and music to free reading, maps, jokes, and dancing. Teachers leave with practical strategies, editable resources, and a framework for exploring culture beyond stereotypes while highlighting often-overlooked Spanish-speaking communities.
This session helps teachers increase target language use with confidence. Ashley Mikkelsen shares a three-step framework: communicate the goal to families and students, provide effective scaffolds, and build shared accountability. Teachers leave with strategies for back-to-school conversations, visual and language supports, storytelling roles, comprehension checks, and a practical Plan B for when lessons don't go as planned.
This session explores how lesson design—not student attitude—drives engagement. Dr. Georgette Leslie shares a five-stage framework for building purpose, interaction, communication, and real-world application into every lesson. Teachers leave with tools to identify disengagement early, boost participation through interactive strategies, leverage technology to amplify student voice, and support reluctant learners.
This session introduces Stuart Blair’s Language in Action approach, showing how language learning becomes more meaningful through movement, creativity, and identity. Teachers explore practical ways to use comics, visualization, drama, embodied play, and immersive environments to deepen learning. Participants also receive a free starter activity sheet and comic storyboard template to bring these ideas into their classrooms.
This session shows how to turn the first five minutes of class into purposeful learning. Rosa Casado shares eight low-prep opening activities that work across proficiency levels, from honors to IEP classes. Teachers leave with a flexible library of engaging routines—including chat mats, mystery images, four corners, emoji check-ins, and music prompts—plus five design principles for creating effective class openings.
This session helps teachers align required textbooks with second language acquisition principles. Claudia Elliott shares three core pillars—comprehensible input, communication, and connection—and demonstrates how to transform textbook units into engaging, input-rich lessons. Teachers leave with a practical SLA framework, a sample unit redesign, and weekly routines that naturally integrate textbook topics.
7 Lessons
This session shows how CI-based storytelling builds comprehension before students read. Ingrid Hoel shares practical storytelling techniques, including circling, drawing, translation, and student participation, plus engaging follow-up activities. Teachers receive a three-level sample story, ready-to-use worksheets and choice boards, and a clear framework for using storytelling to make reading more meaningful and effective.
A rare practitioner's view of whole-body TPR as a complete approach, built by LeAnne Tracey since 1994. She shares her actual Lesson 1 script (written in 1998), vocabulary sorting template, classroom layout drawings, and coding system—all in the goodie bag. Teachers leave knowing how to gather vocabulary, set up the room, write scripts with audience indicators and stage notes, choose command types, and why 90% review / 10% new makes language stick for decades.
Luisa Acevedo answers why speed transforms standard TPR: it's not the movement, it's the pace. She connects Krashen's affective filter to Porges's polyvagal theory, explaining how intentional pacing shifts word storage from Broca's area (conscious, exhaustible processing) to the basal ganglia (procedural memory—where bike-riding lives). Teachers leave with a four-round vocabulary protocol, four game variations, and cautions for adding speed without creating stress.
Liliam Farias solves why classroom songs rarely land: students hear words without meaning. Her story-song-output framework builds the world of the song before students ever hear it. Using a Cuba unit built around "A Cuba Voy," teachers leave with a clear sequence for any song-based unit, comprehension-checking techniques at every stage, and scaffolded writing that moves students from simple sentences into full paragraphs and presentations—not just comprehension, but genuine connection.
Valentina Correa's seven-step teaching path works for first-time story teachers and veterans wanting more structure alike. Grounded in comprehensible input theory and ACTFL guidelines, the sequence covers choosing a story, identifying high-frequency words, establishing meaning with gestures, pre-loading with games, reading with circling, extending, and reviewing. Demonstrated using a bear named Rio from her curriculum Aventuras in Learning, every step is visible and easy to replicate.
Silvana Ibañez solves the "another story?" problem with five story-asking variations that change who controls the narrative, how much structure is given, and what students do afterward. Teachers leave with a before/during/after framework, five ready-to-run formats ranging from fully open-ended to template-driven, a long list of after-story activities (role-play, slideshows, books, formative games), and tips for props and rejoinders—same CI goals, five different student experiences.
Joshua Cabral solves slow unit planning by demonstrating 16 CI activities—spanning interaction, storytelling, and reading/writing—all built around one short story about a boy named Diego who gets lost in a market. He then shows how two reusable AI prompts can generate both a leveled story and a full matching activity set from any topic, vocabulary list, and proficiency level—turning a single prompt document into a two-week unit covering all communication modes.
7 Lessons
Chelsea Lawrence's silent discussions solve the one-teacher-30-students problem: students communicate entirely in writing, in small groups, using colored pens to negotiate meaning and reach conclusions—no spoken words required. Teachers leave with a full setup guide, scaffolds, a language support board, worked examples at novice through advanced levels, two rubric models, and a place in the interpretive/interpersonal/presentational cycle—where even the quietest students finally feel heard.
Rebecca Blouwolff uses Bill VanPatten's framework to sort classroom activities into exercises, activities, and tasks—and shows why only tasks produce real engagement. A small tweak (adding a comparison, rating, or decision point) turns purposeless activities into tasks with clear endpoints. Teachers leave with two diagnostic questions, a self-check quiz for practice, and examples from quick two-minute tasks to multi-week projects—not more to add, but a new lens for what you already do.
Cambre Santos addresses heritage learners' silence—not emptiness, but learned exclusion from academic spaces. Her Socratic seminar structure, built around three learner profiles, measures participation by what students do with language, not accuracy alone. Teachers leave with a two-day structure, question sets moving from comprehension to synthesis, an inner/outer circle rotation guaranteeing every student speaks, a four-criteria rubric, and discussion leader cards—adaptable to any language, with one rule: questions must connect to students' lives.
Marissa Tate bridges the gap between knowing students should speak more and actually making it happen—without ditching your textbook or adding prep. Drawing from four years of high school French, she shares low-prep speaking and listening activities ranging from brain breaks to formative assessments, plus an overview of a conversation-track course built around these tools. The throughline is recycling: a handful of structures reused across units, themes, and levels for daily low-stakes speaking practice.
Megan Whalon exposes a hidden problem: activities that look productive but let students finish without ever making meaning. She distinguishes real input from the appearance of input, then models vocabulary introduction that is comprehensible, personalized, and culturally anchored—using a slide-by-slide Quebec example. Teachers leave with techniques for staying in the target language, interpretive strategies to teach students directly, and extension games that recycle vocabulary. Start with meaning, not memorization.
Margarita Perez Garcia, drawing on her own experience as an anxious language learner and years with struggling readers, offers eight mindful responses for when a student freezes or withdraws during reading. Teachers leave with specific language for acknowledging struggle without spectacle, two target-language brain breaks, a classroom layout strategy for quiet support, and a glossary card system for independent meaning-making—all aimed at protecting dignity while keeping anxious readers connected to the text.
Jill Wiley pushes back on the myth that positive relationships alone fix everything—while making a compelling case that relationships remain the variable most within a teacher's control. Drawing on 25-plus years in the classroom and multiple research studies, she explores what healthy student-teacher relationships actually look like, what mindsets make them possible, and what actions teachers can take starting Monday, leaving with practical strategies and a renewed sense of why the work matters.
7 Lessons
Hongmin Yu solves the problem of language class feeling isolated by threading Mandarin through her district's existing math and science curricula. Using Guatemala's Festival of Giant Kites, Coco, the Qingming Festival, and the Tao Te Ching, she builds units connecting unit conversion to remembrance, water data to a Mandarin poster campaign, and real student conflicts to social-emotional discussion. Teachers leave with cross-disciplinary sequences, three cultural projects, and sentence-frame scaffolds—culture, classics, math, science, and feelings as one lesson.
Dr. Amanda Lanier bridges the gap between teaching culture as content (food, flags, festivals) and teaching interculturally—where students notice, compare, and reflect across cultural boundaries. The shift builds directly on proficiency-based teaching, not away from it. Teachers leave with a four-phase framework (observation, main task, debriefing, reflection), a worked fashion-and-fabric example scaling from novice to advanced, and a repeatable way to ask better questions about content they already teach.
Carla and Marlon Reis reframe adult acquisition around exposure over memorization, drawing on their own experience learning English and Romanian. They name four habits that slow learners: isolated vocabulary lists, grammar over exposure, artificially slowed speech, and waiting to speak. Teachers leave with concrete linguistic examples and a five-point sequence—pronunciation first, daily exposure, shadowing, conversation partners, vocabulary in context—with acquisition principles that apply directly to any world language classroom.
Menya Jefferson solves grammar points that never land by showing how the right song makes structures click without students noticing. Her music-based activities—from fill-in-the-blank listening to laminated lyric puzzles—each target specific structures like the subjunctive, preterite, or reciprocal verbs. Teachers leave with ready-to-adapt formats, two free month-long music tournament resources, and a sample lesson moving students through research, discussion, translation, writing, and recorded speaking.
Andrea Olatunji solves project fatigue—teacher hesitation and student disengagement—by sharing ten projects her own students have asked to repeat. First, she names six elements separating successful projects from flat ones: student voice, clear objectives, examples, a real audience, revision time, and specific feedback. Teachers leave with ten ready-to-adapt ideas spanning every proficiency level, from animating classroom objects to a school-wide Latin food truck competition, plus an ACTFL-aligned rubric document.
Courtney Jackson shows how to embed grammar and vocabulary into reading sets so naturally that students acquire them through repetition without explicit instruction. Write an exemplar, replicate it changing only key details, and build a 10–15-text gallery walk with identical structure but varied content. Teachers leave with a step-by-step planning process, two fully worked examples (pets/chores and weather-by-city), and a level-up technique mixing first- and third-person perspectives that generates spontaneous student grammar awareness.
Elizabeth Porter moves students beyond bilingualism into biliteracy through Bilingual Theater, developed during doctoral research in Senegal with actor Ibrahima Mbaye, where Wolof-French code-switching is daily reality. Teachers leave with the sandwich method for weaving target and native language lines without translation, a walkthrough for adapting Shakespeare or Molière into Gen Z bilingual scripts using AI, and rhythm techniques that make complex syntax performable—validating every language students bring to class.
7 Lessons
Ashley Eberhart bridges the gap between a great idea on Saturday and something that works Monday morning with her Friction, Filter, First Version framework: name what makes an idea hard to use, identify the real goal underneath it, then build the smallest workable version to try immediately. Teachers leave with two worked examples, ready-to-adapt AI prompts for each, and clarity on where AI helps versus where teacher judgment leads—turning ideas already in your notebooks into something usable next period.
Maureen Lamb addresses teachers' real AI anxieties—vocabulary overreach, full translations, off-curriculum responses—with the CLEAR prompt protocol (clarity, layout, examples, aim, relevance) for building custom GPTs, gems, or Claude projects locked to class vocabulary and source texts. Teachers leave with three ready-to-adapt designs (conversation partner, tiered reading generator, text tutor), a complete sample script to copy directly, and a security checklist for testing any bot before students see it.
Noemi Rodriguez solves the back-to-school materials scramble using tools already inside Canva for Education. She walks through finding and translating ready-made resources, generating AI images that spark discussion, repurposing a single presentation into multiple formats, and building interactive AI-powered whiteboards for collaborative classwork. Teachers leave knowing exactly where each feature lives, how to set it up, and how to adapt it for a target-language classroom—whether you have five minutes or a full planning period.
Pamela Parks replaces the five-paragraph research essay with a game-rich, target-language project framework students actually remember. She walks through selecting core skills using Universal Design for Learning, running vocabulary and grammar mini-games, and reaching a big performance day with a simple grading process. Teachers leave with a clear planning sequence, immediately usable activities, and built-in differentiation—plus a clear explanation of why students reach for Google Translate mid-project and how to prevent it.
Repeated reading boosts retention and fluency—but only if repetition feels fresh. Jill Wiley draws on research and classroom experience to share a toolkit of low- and no-prep activities giving students multiple exposures to the same text without the "we already read this" groan. This session is for any world language teacher who wants more mileage from every text they use, without extra planning or materials.
Ali demonstrates how LingoTeach.ai generates a complete multi-activity language lesson in 90 seconds—reading, listening, vocabulary, and interactive tasks from a single prompt. Teachers leave with a framework for writing prompts that work, a live demo across Spanish, French, and Italian, and strategies for adapting resources mid-lesson. Whether or not you use LingoTeach, the prompt-writing approach applies to any AI platform—and when content matches student interests, behavior management eases and learning accelerates.
Lake Mathison tackles whether grades themselves block proficiency, walking through her own shift from a points-based gradebook to a feedback-only model. She makes a clear case for why zeros, averaging, late penalties, and extra credit distort what grades should represent, then offers graduated starting points—from small language shifts to full redesigns—for different comfort levels and school contexts. New to ungrading or already experimenting, teachers leave with evidence and practical next steps toward proficiency over points.
37 Lessons