I just had the thought that teachers who are insecure with their abilities in teaching using comprehensible input can drop that thought, because really, if they just provide enough input to their students, those students will learn automatically in spite of any perceived shortcomings in technique or skills on the part of the teacher.
No longer is the domain of teaching languages dependent on how wonderful and talented the teacher is. Slow and steady L2 wins the race. The talented traditional teacher who fails to devote over 95% of instructional time to the target language is a very bad teacher.
(A 1997 YBP study found that the typical AP Spanish teacher in New York state used between 18% and 20% of available instructional minutes in the language; the rest was spent on explaining the language in English. Their average AP score was 1.5 throughout the state. The problem, the YPB smartest researchers in the room surmised, was due to the fact that 5 students in every class scored 3 or 4, but the rest scored 1 or 2, bringing down the average. It turns out that those AP teachers were only teaching to the AP students like when they were in high school, when they were the smartest people in the room. When asked why so many students got such low scores, most of the teachers said something like, “I don’t care. The scores come out in July and no one really cares because the students have graduated and the guidance counslors don’t give the scores to the administrators, because they don’t care either.”) When asked which group, the counselors or the admins, didn’t care, most replied, “Both. Nobody cares. How do you think I have been able to keep my job for so long without getting any results except for a few students?”
We learn from the study that it’s not about talent or what kind of scarf you where, but the amount of input your students received. The data is starting to collect on that point. The YBP study is therefore important to dispel the myth that the AP teachers are the best teachers in every building. We used to believe them because of the way they dressed and walked faster in the hallways than other teachers, and then had the scarf thing going on, and had a way of looking a middle school teachers and lower level teachers with a kind of grimacy smile, and unkind eyes.)