Last week, Richard and I led a workshop on teaching in an "international classroom." Most workshops of these sorts emphasize what people fear could wrong if students and instructors have different educational, national, cultural or linguistic backgrounds. The workshop we taught foregrounded something else: that difference can make a (good) difference in teaching and learning. We discussed different ways that we draw on some differences we observe and learn about to make what we teach speak (loudly!) to our students. Then we redesigned our lessons with this discussion in mind. From showing how visual emphasis and exaggeration can be used in teaching even when the students don't speak the same language as you, to suggesting that ESL speakers in a literature class bring in translations of a Shakespeare play as a way of helping all students in the class make sense of the different ways meaning can be constructed in a script, to reminding instructors of the value that their backgrounds give students, many offered great suggestions and insights for revising our lesson plans as we envision the scope of our students' backgrounds more broadly than we might have. Have you revised a lesson to better speak to heterogeneous classrooms? Reply to this post, drop Richard or I an email or come to this Thursday's workshop and let us know how!