Higher education today is filled with information about inclusive practices for our classrooms and schools that need to be discussed from multiple perspectives, and do not have simple solutions. A quick Google search will lead to hundreds of education events focused on inclusion for nearly every day of the year. These webinars are informative, use highly qualified speakers, and share new ideas and perspectives. However, studies have shown that although webinars are great ways to give faculty information, they do little in terms of changing behaviors or decisions by educators in the long term. A quote from Nancy Dana, author of “The PLC Book” states “While we may have been intrigued and even inspired, the next day we would all return to the hectic pace of our classroom routines, and whatever was learned during that one “in-service” day, quickly faded from our memories.” Dana goes on to promote PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) as a way to follow up information workshops with oppo...

Early in the fall of 1992, in my first grad school course at Oklahoma State University I first heard of Stephen Krashen . His famous Theory of Second Language Acquisition posits that “acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language - natural communication - in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding” (Krashen, 1992). In essence, meaningful communication is what produces any learning, not just English language learning. That fall, discussions rambled about Krashen’s notion of comprehensible input, expressed as i + 1. Simply put, this formula states that learners should always receive input (i) that is just one (1) level of difficulty above their current understanding. In theory, you cannot quantify i or 1, but we know something like i + 20 is suboptimal. In the classroom, you can open the lines of communication so students can feel safe expressing gaps in knowledge and communication...