If you work in ELT and you’ve reached the point where people sometimes ask you to do things and you say yes because you respect them, you know how these projects start. An email. A name you recognize. A project that sounds both ambitious and important. You say yes. Then you go back and read the details.

That’s how I ended up as a contributing author on The 6 Principles for Exemplary Teaching of English Learners: Integrating Technology Into Instruction and Assessment, coming from TESOL Press in January 2027.

The 6 Principles framework has been around for a while. If you’ve worked in K-12 language education or spent any time in professional development in the US context, you’ve probably run into it. There are existing books in the series covering different teaching contexts: young learners, adult education, academic purposes.

This volume has a specific argument running through it. A lot of what circulates about technology in education right now comes from teachers on TikTok showing the newest tool, walking through tutorials, promising to save you time and prep. I understand the appeal; teaching is exhausting, and anything that cuts the workload feels like a lifeline. But saving time isn’t the same as teaching well, and the series editor Deborah Short was clear from the beginning: technology in this book had to serve a pedagogical purpose, always at the service of the teacher, not the other way around. The strongest classroom technology is often the kind you barely notice. It’s doing something useful while the learning stays in the foreground.

My road into the project was a call for authors I responded to toward the end of 2025 and then, honestly, forgot about. I assumed nothing would come of it. You can imagine what it felt like when the acceptance email arrived. My role wasn’t assigned; I chose it. At the kickoff meeting, I met the series editor Deborah Short and the other three authors: Dr. Quanisha Charles and Dr. Christina Kitson from the US, and Alejandra Mareco from Argentina (but working and living in the US). We were walked through the book’s outline and invited to claim sections. I signed up for Principle 5, which covers monitoring and assessing student language development, and Chapter 4, the application scenarios. One chapter and part of another

What the work actually looked like

Principle 5 sits inside Chapter 3, where all six principles are explored in relation to technology, and it’s the section I lived most naturally into. I’ve been a Cambridge examiner for years, and the questions underneath assessment are ones I’ve been sitting with for a long time. What counts as evidence of language development? Who decides? What happens when a tool starts generating that evidence for you and you stop asking whether it’s actually measuring what you think it is?

Chapter 4 was different. The premise is that good teaching doesn’t happen in generalized advice; it happens in specific rooms, with specific students, under specific constraints. So I sat down with five teachers and interviewed them: a primary teacher at an American school in Madrid, a teacher working with secondary newcomer refugees in the UK, a colleague at a research university in East Asia, a teacher in a Venezuelan state school, and a teacher preparing students for Cambridge exams in Madrid.

None of those scenarios are success stories in any clean sense. That was entirely deliberate. The teachers I spoke to were not describing ideal conditions. They were describing real decisions made with limited time, unreliable connectivity, students who came to class carrying things that had nothing to do with language learning, and tools that sometimes helped and sometimes didn’t. That’s where the material worth reading actually lives. Not the polished version; the version with the trade-offs still visible.

The concept I didn’t know I needed

Somewhere inside writing the exam prep scenario, a concept I’d been circling in my practitioner writing finally got a name. I’d touched on the territory before in an article I wrote for the IH Journal, but the scenario sharpened it into something I could actually call something. I’ve been calling it the illusion of improvement.

Here’s the problem. AI writing tools can make a learner’s text look better: cleaner syntax, more varied vocabulary, fewer surface errors. A quick read and it looks like progress. But if the learner hasn’t generated that language themselves, if they haven’t made the decisions that produce those choices, then the construct you’re trying to assess hasn’t moved. The score goes up. The learning stays where it was.

This isn’t an argument against AI tools in language learning. I want to be clear about that, because the easy misreading is that I’m one of those people who thinks the tools are the problem. The problem isn’t the tool. The problem is assessing without first knowing what you’re measuring. Construct clarity has to come before the technology, not after. Without it, more data doesn’t produce more insight. It produces more noise with a veneer of precision, and the tool just accelerates whatever confusion was already there.

I think this is one of the more honest things the book says. It’s also probably the thing that will make some readers uncomfortable. That’s a sign it belongs.

Where things are now

The manuscript went through blind peer review earlier this year. The feedback was useful, pointed in places, and occasionally humbling. I completed my revision pass and submitted it ahead of the July deadline. The book is still well before production, and publication is January 2027, so there’s a long road left.

One thing I didn’t predict: the project seems to have opened another door. A proposal I put in for a TESOL Zip Guide on Second Language Writing was accepted, and I’m fairly certain that wouldn’t have happened without the visibility that working on the 6Ps project created. I don’t have a grand lesson from that. Maybe just that committing seriously to one piece of work tends to generate more work, whether you planned for it or not.

What worries me

I want to say this plainly, because I think our field is sometimes too polite about it.

The book will arrive in January 2027 into a professional context that has been moving much faster than any publication cycle can track. The tools we’re writing about are not the tools teachers will be using by the time this is in their hands. That’s a real limitation, and dressing it up as a feature would be dishonest.

But that’s not actually what worries me most. What worries me is whether teachers have the conceptual vocabulary to evaluate whatever comes next. Not the specific tools. The questions you bring to any tool. What am I trying to find out about my students’ language? Does this thing help me find it? If the book does one useful thing, I hope it’s giving those questions some staying power. Not a catalog of apps. Not a checklist of features that will be outdated in two years. A set of questions that travel.

The other thing I keep thinking about is equity. The scenarios in Chapter 4 are deliberately diverse in context: Spain, the UK, East Asia, Venezuela, and the US. But not every teacher has stable internet, device access, institutional support, or time. Technology-integrated assessment can look like a luxury from inside an under-resourced classroom, and I’ve tried to keep that visible throughout the writing. I’m aware that a published book from a professional press is already a certain kind of artifact, reaching a certain kind of reader. The gap between who we’re writing for and who most needs what we’re saying is something I haven’t been able to resolve.

Why I think it matters anyway

The existing 6Ps books do something genuinely useful. They give teachers a principled framework that doesn’t require a research background to apply. This volume tries to do the same thing for technology in a way that doesn’t become a product catalog or a set of instructions with a shelf life.

What makes it different from most of the technology-and-education books I’ve read is the order of operations. Most of those books start from what tools can do and work back to pedagogy. This one starts from what teachers already know how to do and asks how technology might expand that. That inversion matters more than it sounds.

I don’t know yet whether we’ve pulled it off. The peer reviewers had notes. I had my own doubts on every re-read. But the teachers I interviewed are in those pages, working through real constraints in real classrooms, and that’s not nothing.

If you work in ELT, teach teachers, or find yourself wondering what principled technology integration actually looks like on a Tuesday when the Wi-Fi is down and your students are tired, this is the book I’ll point you toward in January 2027. I’m confident the other authors brought the same honesty to their sections. And I know I tried to bring it to mine.

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