“It must be acknowledged that there is more scientific research, or there has been more scientific research, conducted with monolingual English-speaking children, and that additional research related to teaching literacy development for English learners and emergent bilinguals is needed to advance our understanding of their literacy development.”

“We have an underserved area that's experiencing a massive growth in student population. And so it's really important to then focus on it. Schools are adjusting, they're quick, they're doing the best they can, but we need to be having these conversations around research [and] best practices so that we can set schools up for success and students up for success.”

“I just think we have an exciting future in this country. I was in a classroom last week, I saw some of their writing. I saw them speaking, heard them speaking in two languages fluently, easily, excitedly. I just got very excited. These kids are going to be our doctors and our teachers and our engineers and they’re bilingual or multilingual.”

“Their language is an asset, whatever language it is and however much it is.”

“I realized that I truly have a calling of being with kids, and the biggest thing to me is the intrinsic reward that you receive, especially working with economically disadvantaged communities.”

“It’s all about confidence, building the student’s confidence. It’s a huge component of preparing students to be successful.”

“It’s not about the teacher. When planning, my biggest suggestion is do not plan for your own actions. Plan for what the students are going to be doing in every single portion of the lesson.”

“What professional learning communities does, it teaches you, again, systems on how to look at data, how to lesson plan, how to make formative assessments, how do you respond to data, the whole everything.”

“I couldn't just lead my campus into the Science of Teaching Reading if I didn't open myself up to, maybe I was wrong…it wasn't easy, but it really took me looking at student work to prove that what I had been doing all these years wasn't working.”

“It's serving every child we have in the seat, whether they're monolingual or they speak two or three languages. What works is a systematic approach to learning how to read.”

“Now that we know better? And we know more about the research, and that how speaking and reading go together, we're just getting smarter. We're just learning more about how reading works, how the brain works, how kids acquire knowledge, and we just have to be smarter, I guess, in how we do things.”

“We found there is no indication that bilingual instruction impeded academic achievement, either in the native language or in English. What we observed on average, [was] that kids that were in bilingual programs did a lot better in literacy.”

“There's some sounds in English that aren't present in a first language. Or there are orthography letters that sound different in one language versus the other. So you just have to realize you have to take into consideration the kid's language background when you're teaching foundational skills.”

“We develop kids' oral language when they're older in conjunction with teaching them to read and teaching them content area knowledge. You can't not do that from the beginning, you have to support kids in foundational reading skills.”

“Second language learners also come with a lot of knowledge in their first language, which is really important to consider. It's not like they don't have background knowledge.”

“We need to promote collaboration, because we need to talk to the different teachers that the student has in order to see if it is indeed a second language acquisition issue, or it belongs to the patterns, the symptoms, that a student with dyslexia might have.”

“It is very important for us to have this communication with parents and teachers and have them as our best allies. They are going to give us a lot of information that we maybe cannot track during our classroom time.”

“Dyslexia is something beyond a language. It is something that our students bring with themselves. We need to give them all the tools and resources in order to help them overcome those symptoms.”

“Virtually all the research highlights the importance of being in a communicative, interactive context if you want to pick up a language."

“There are differences between the linguistic demands of schooling and the kind of language that we use in everyday conversational context outside of school."

“All of these processes are amplified when there's a community of peers or people that we can discuss these ideas with, we can get feedback, we can explore ideas collectively."

“How did you get the buy-in from the teachers? We didn't wait for buy-in. We said, ‘We've got a law sitting here and we've got coaches that know what to do.’ … Once they tried to do it, it worked. And then there came buy-in.”

“The laws are telling us that time's up. We need to get this job done. The good news is we know how to do it. We just need to get it done everywhere.”

“My greatest frustration with colleges of education is that we have for centuries been colleges of philosophy, not of science. And I think we are beginning to see a shift in the profession based on science, not just on what we think or believe in.”

“I think I used to think that it was going to be possible for a teacher to figure it out on her own. Or I thought that it would be possible for a school to figure it out on their own, or a district, or even a state. And the more that I realize… like, it's very rare that people are getting the outcomes that they actually want.”

“I think we have strayed away from the idea of there being a social contract between the community and schools. And if we could get back to the point where we had an agreement about what the obligations of schools actually are, then we'd do everything differently.”

“One thing that people often get wrong about one-pagers is that it has all the answers, it has all the strategies. But I always say that it's a reminder, it's a conversation starter.”

“In order to help our students learn effectively, teachers need to know how they learn and sometimes why they do not learn.”

“Think-pair-share is important because it makes students feel safe before they share with the class.”

“The main thing as a teacher for me is that you always need to learn and that you never stop learning.”

“The best research is the stuff that you can glean information from and then do something with that's actionable and practical.”

“We're also making sure that our students are prepared in structured literacy, not just to one program, so they're able to understand the structure and adopt it to any program any district is using.”

“The Center for Structured Literacy is about empowering teachers at the onset—bachelor's degree. If districts have to retrain them after they graduate, then we're not doing something right.”

“We all have the same goal. We all want children to be good readers. We do. And it has never not been anyone's goal. We have to respect that about each other.”