“This idea of having a coherent curriculum that systematically builds knowledge and skills over time is something that we think is really important for our kids.”

“I'd just point to making sure that you really give students the opportunity to learn more about the world that they're in and the cultures that we have in the past, present, and future. They're all really important things for our kids. And, you know, from an instrumentalist point of view, because it helps their reading comprehension.”

"I think we respect teacher autonomy when we give them the knowledge that they need about how the English writing system works, right across the Reading Rope, and how the English language works, right across the Reading Rope.”

“A read-aloud is an interactive language experience…where a teacher reads something, elicits a conversation from students. Those conversational turns are so essential in [a] read-aloud. It's a shared literacy experience around a text.”

“What I don't think teachers understand, and I say this having been one of those teachers, is the intentionality that needs to happen in planning the read-aloud.”

“When we add things like think-alouds and being explicit in our vocabulary, we are building [students’] metacognition and [their] ability to understand text.”

“We all have those gaps in knowledge and life experiences, regardless of where we come from and regardless of our zip code and regardless of our personal or family situation.”

“Above all other things in education, literacy is a gateway to so many of the things that are essential for human flourishing and human choice.”

“Knowledge is so complex that it actually offers a number of different benefits. And different kinds of knowledge actually benefit literacy development in different ways.”

“It makes sense to capitalize on the knowledge that students bring, both as a platform for their literacy learning, [and] also to further develop it so that they're also understanding the context of their lives and their communities and their families.”

“Your job is not to get through the curriculum, your job is not to get kids engaged in authentic, real-world, exciting tasks. Your job is to have an impact across those many notions.”

“We're very good at finding problems and fixing them but we're not as good—we're not having the courage—to study expertise and scale it up. And that's my mission. Scale up the expertise we have.”

“I'm an evidence-based person. Sometimes I don't like the results, but that doesn't mean you get to deny it. Some people want to deny it. Some people want to get angry with it. And sometimes evidence does get in the way of a good opinion.”

“Good instruction needs to be interactive. We're using words. Vocabulary pervades the day.”

“Having mastery of your language is part of your self image.”

“The more you know, the more you can laugh.”

“We're always encountering something new with language. We can't just learn it by sitting down and being told a bunch of rules.”

“We need kids to be able to sound out the words, but we also need them to know what they mean. Otherwise, the text won't make sense. So we really need to be working on both of these at the same time.”

“Really value what kids bring to the classroom, even if it's not perfect yet, or if it's not exactly what adults would say.”

“It's really important that we're thinking about purposeful, planned, and intentional vocabulary supports to make sure that everybody is included in the learning and can participate in the classroom.”

“Realistically, kids love to learn big words. They make use of them. They don't really differentiate it. So that's an adult imposition, right? Which ones are the big ones or which ones are the hard ones? If we use them with kids, they will use them too. And enjoy it.”

“The history of our country, the history of who we are as individuals in our families, absolutely impacts who we are as teachers and how we show up in the classroom.”

“I'm just thinking of all these beautiful teachers and trying not to cry. They are showing up fully as who they are for their students … by being themselves they end up creating an environment that just makes it a great place to learn and a place where students feel loved and a place where students can be themselves.”

“You address people as human beings because they're human and that's the right thing to do. And if you engage and see your kids as humans, then it's really helpful to get them engaged.”

“If I was able to make a change, you 110 percent can make a change. And a lot of that is just being open to feedback, being curious, and ensuring that whatever you are doing, you are not causing harm to students.”

“What I would say to any teacher of balanced literacy: Let us bring our best selves and expand our knowledge. We both have things we can learn from each other. ”

“Pass on why you learned to be a teacher. Pass it on to your students. Let’s make that next generation of teachers truly excited about what we can do to release the potential of every child.”

“Knowledge building cannot wait. …Start from the beginning of schooling, from early grades. Multilingual students and monolingual students, they both need support developing knowledge and literacy skills.”

“In knowledge building, we usually like to go for cultivating in-depth knowledge. That means interconnected ideas need to be told throughout multiple lessons, multiple classes, rather than planning individual separate lessons.”

“When readers have good broad knowledge, prior knowledge, then it is more likely the readers can recall text information ideas, and they can make better inferences about missing ideas in text.”

“Comprehension is an outcome, and it's based on being able to read words accurately, know what they mean, have adequate background knowledge, and also [be] able to make inferences.”

“I've seen things go awry. Good things get interpreted incorrectly. The Science of Reading has that potential…where people could take that and sort of start creating their own meaning about what it means and start downloading that in districts and schools in ways that are counterproductive.”

“If you look at the early studies from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, they really were the building blocks for phonemic awareness and phonics and the way in which we have identified the foundation skills as being essential. We act like the Science of Reading is something new, and we've been building this for decades.”

“I now know I shouldn't have felt guilty, but I also know that I could have taught that from the outset in a much more structured way where the students would have left understanding the concepts better without wasting time.”

“I now know I shouldn't have felt guilty, but I also know that I could have taught that from the outset in a much more structured way where the students would have left understanding the concepts better without wasting time.”—Greg Ashman “This idea that kids don't need to know anything anymore, they just need to practice skills is really quite a pernicious and damaging idea.”

“Think about the teaching methods that you're being presented with. Ask about the evidence and question whether this is really the optimal way of teaching literacy or whatever it is, or whether it's more based on wishful thinking.”

“Language is inextricably linked to culture. We want to make sure these families and children feel valued and honored within our schools.”

“No matter what language you start to learn some of those skills in, there's a transfer and understanding of how to listen to sounds and how to put sounds together.”

“What you’re helping children do is create a mosaic, putting all those ideas together in a knowledge network. If you don’t do it explicitly, many children cannot do it on their own.”

“We’ve got to start early. We’ve got to start immediately, and know that children are eager to learn and use the content to engage them.”

“Part of preventing reading difficulties means focusing on programs to ensure that all children have access to books from birth and that they have access to adults who will read those books with them and discuss them.”

“I see academic language and exposure to academic language as an expansion of children's language skills that both contributes to successful literacy—successful reading comprehension—and gets built through encounters with texts, but also encounters with oral activities.”

“Let your classroom be noisier. Let the kids be more engaged and more socially engaged, because that is actually a contribution to their language development and to their motivation to keep working.”