“Incrementalism is just not going to serve our purpose unless you want to keep things as they are. And I hate to say this, Susan … some people wouldn't mind leaving things as they are. And we can't do that, and we can't do it incrementally. We've got to really move, like last year.”

“You’ve got to understand how [two programs] fit together and what the purpose is. Giving teachers materials that are literally incoherent and don't fit with each other is not the answer.”

“We need to have a system … using the best knowledge that we have systematically throughout the state, throughout the country, with systems that pick up kids who are at risk and don't let them fail.”

“Theory is an explanation about how things work. …It's a structured framework, a mental framework, that helps us explain, and predict, and understand phenomena.”

“Theoretical models matter because they offer insights into the processes of reading and writing, as well as factors that contribute to the development of reading and writing skills and/or difficulties in development. Teachers' understanding of this will empower them to make decisions about instructional approaches.”

“Lower order skills are necessary for higher order skills—that means skills and knowledge have a series of causal effects. So if you flip it the other way—any challenges…skills—it's going to have a series of impacts on higher order skills.”

“A lot of educators understand that reading and writing are related, but I think as educators, we need to have a really precise understanding about it. We need to have a good mental model about how they're related and why they're related, so that we can use that knowledge to inform our instruction and assessment.”

“If an educator goes to a professional development and learns about something like phoneme awareness…but you don't have a framework in which to attach it, you can sort of go down a rabbit trail on one thing instead of thinking about how it relates to the whole.”

“Neurodiversity means that we have lots of different ways to think, and we each come to the table with different brain structures.”

“Oral language difficulties are a crystal ball into reading comprehension.”

“You, as an educator, can be the one that really makes a difference for that child. It only takes one person to make a huge difference in the life of a child.”

“When I'm thinking out something complex, I'll want to write it out, so that I can see where the holes are in my thinking. It's really this reciprocal relationship between the concepts or the knowledge we have and the language we have to convey that knowledge.”

“As our conceptual knowledge builds, our language ability will build. So there's really a bidirectionality that occurs between background knowledge and language.”

“We’re overlooking the ways in which the typical approach to teaching reading comprehension and writing actually conflict with what cognitive science tells us about how people learn to do those things.”

“We spend much more time trying to teach them to read, but we kind of expect them to just pick up writing. You know, for most kids, it does not happen.”

“No matter how good you are at making inferences, if you don't have the requisite background knowledge, you're not gonna be able to do it.”

“It doesn't work to just ask inexperienced writers to just write down stuff. That is not going to provide the cognitive benefits.”

“Language is connected to thinking. If you can talk and write in a more sophisticated way that reflects that you are thinking in a more sophisticated way.”

“There is no, ‘Let's try this. Let's try that.’ When it's evidence based, you know that it's proven to be effective.”

“It's important that we are aligning our practices to standards and what the students are required to do—but also what they need.”

“If we don't make a conscious effort to utilize evidence-based practices, we are going to be failing our most at-risk populations.”

“All students should have the opportunity for multiple readings of the same text to build comprehension, to build fluency.”

“It's really important to utilize assessments, [to] make sure that my students are getting exactly what they need based on the data that I get from assessments, but also based on the data that I get from regular progress monitoring.”

“This is not something that can be just done at the schoolhouse. It involves the community and all of our community stakeholders.”

“Find a mentor. Someone you trust. Listen to that person, watch that person, ask that person questions. You know, you don't have to figure this out on your own. People want to help you and you have to take that help. It's not a sign of weakness. It's a sign that you want to be better.”

“I want them to be proud of where they came from, always, because that's part of their story. It's always going to be an important part of their story.”

“I have no magic answers. I have some experiences and I have a little bit of wisdom from three decades of time spent in the education field, but I absolutely do not have it all figured out.”

“The reality is that the journey toward wisdom in any career, especially in education, has to be slow and steady.”

“We have to help guide our younger cohorts with our wisdom. But we also have to take pointers from them. They know lots of things that I do not know, things that I never learned how to do. They also were students more recently than I was … they remember what it feels like when this or that happens to you.”

“When you begin to read, you really have to analyze everything in front of you. The letter, the shape of the letter, how it connects to the sound. And proficient readers just look at the whole thing and they grab it—and it's like they heard it. It is almost no difference. I speak; I read; it's a continuous stream of language and I just grab it.”

“We talked about languages being different. They're exercising slightly different muscles of your language system.”

“Science is informed by teachers and children. We're all together. I do not teach children. Teachers don't usually do science. But we have to find ways of connecting with each other.”

“It can be hard to remember that there’s a lot going into my reading today [that] I didn't have all along.”

“I have a fear that too much decoding practice can become ‘Why am I reading?’ We lose the ultimate point of why all of us read, which is to learn and to gain meaning.”

“Kids know when a text is worth their time.”

“We want to put a great book in a kid’s hands and have them get excited about reading and therefore get good at reading. And it really goes the other way. And so it’s once you build that ability to read, then that excitement comes with reading.”

“I firmly believe that no matter how old you are, you still need to learn the same information.”

“In my mind, I use this equation. Knowledge equals motivation, equals active learning, equals resilience, equals success.”

“Creating a literate brain is a team sport. Everyone needs to be involved. The parents, caregivers, teachers—they need to be engaged in an interactive way.”

“Literacy is a civil right. It's also a gift. It's an opportunity to share thoughts, feelings with others that can be revisited and saved.”

“If you learn how to swim, you can swim in a lake, a pool, an ocean, whatever. But that's not the case for comprehension. You can't learn to comprehend and then take that out into different situations for different purposes. You can learn some things that will help you, but in general, it's the topic and purpose that are going to impact how well you understand something.”

“If I was going to define comprehension, it's not a single thing. I mean, that's the problem. We want it to be a single thing, but it depends upon what you're reading and why you're reading it.”

“What comprehension is is the interaction of what you bring into that reading situation and what you already know about it, and your motivation and purpose to comprehend it.”

“There's just not enough mental reserve to be able to build that meaning that quickly. So it helps tremendously that you have some knowledge about it beforehand. That knowledge gives you a place to put information. So when you read about something, it gives you storage for the information. It's kind of like a cubby hole that you put the mail in, in an office.”

“[On dyslexia instruction] It's instruction that we know that all students should have, because that's the instruction that is most aligned to the scientific evidence. But it's instruction that they need with multiple practice opportunities and multiple repetitions.”

“Just because we have this report and we say, ‘All right, this curriculum has all the stuff,’ if you don't teach it, then you're a red flag of your own.”

“Thank you to those folks who have been listening. Thank you to the folks who are curious about learning more, those who have spent years implementing and tweaking and improving literacy outcomes for our country's next generation. I mean, that's huge.”

“It's a movement of improvement, right? We're constantly striving to improve. And don't give up. Share your stories; share your success stories.”

“Ultimately, kids can thrive and grow in conditions that you may not ever have imagined. I want our school to prove nature's law is wrong.”

“We aim to shift the standard. Good simply cannot be good enough for populations experiencing extreme trauma. Literacy is the key to unlocking imagination, creativity, and transformation.”

“Education isn't just about academics—it's about creating a safe place and providing holistic, evidence-based literacy instruction that catalyzes real change.”

“We’re not just doing school, but educating people. I think a lot of people do school, we’re trying to educate our community holistically.”

“Our goal is not just to do school differently, but to prove that with the right support, students can achieve beyond expectations.”

“If you don't get reading right in an elementary school, every piece of the school suffers.”

“Vocabulary is how we describe concepts. It's how we know how to talk to one another. And vocabulary development weaves its way through all four domains in the standards. All four—reading, writing, listening and speaking, and language.”

“What the standards say is, ‘Leveled texts are out and complex texts are in.’ There's no research behind assigning a level to students' reading and then sort of imprisoning them in that.”

“Text complexity level is critical for students to be able to do well when they leave school and also so they can independently read texts and other sorts of sources on their own as well.”

“So standards are really important, right? Because they allow a meeting of the minds in terms of this is what our students need to be learning. It's like a compact, if you will, with our students and our parents and the public to say, ‘This is what you can expect your students to be learning.’”

“The standards define the ‘what’ importantly: the level of complexity, the level of sophistication, etcetera. But the curriculum tells us how to do the ‘what’ well, and how to use the literacy research to make sure all students get access.”

“The more stuff you know, the better you're able to navigate the world. Whether that means as a citizen…as a worker…as a college student…as a mom or dad—whatever it is—the more you know about stuff, the better off and I think the happier life is. And certainly the happier kids' lives are when they're actually learning stuff.”

“The whole notion is that the content matters. What I'm reading about matters; and how I get through that content matters; and how I get access to that content matters—which means I'm building my knowledge slowly but surely.”