“What we’re trying to do is create meaningful text experiences. … The strategies are background, the powerhouse behind the work we’re doing, but the star of the show is the language and the text.”

“Humans are geared, whenever they’re encountering language or knowledge, to try and make meaningful connections. Depending on what they’re already thinking about or what they already know, they’re actually going to come to that text with a very different starting point.”

“If you ever feel like your comprehension work only allows students to produce or perform something on a particular day in which you’ve just read that text, then you may be missing the opportunity to weave meaningful text together.”

“The problem with treating language as if it’s just a set of tick boxes that you can just tick off, is that students need a meaningful reason to hold on to that language. They have to use it or they’ll lose it.”

“If you worry so much about which strategy to use and therefore reduce the amount of text exposure to just short paragraphs to practice that strategy, then I think you might miss out on the opportunity to build up that text representation.”

“When we’re teaching reading comprehension, really let the text be the center of what we’re doing.”

“Comprehension is an active process. It actually requires active engagement and effort from the reader.”

“Comprehension is an integration of knowledge and experience that requires the reader to connect new information from the text with their own knowledge and experiences.”

“Comprehension is dynamic and ongoing. It requires the reader to update and revise their understanding as new information is encountered.”

“What constitutes good comprehension is relative, and it depends on who is reading the text and why they're reading it.”

“The components of comprehension don't develop in isolation. They bootstrap and support each other throughout a reader's development.”

“Inferencing is really central to comprehension. We wouldn't comprehend if we didn't make inferences.”

“I would just encourage teachers not to underestimate the importance of supporting even the inferences that might seem obvious to us.”

“Very broadly speaking, comprehension is how we make sense of the world around us. We're constantly taking in information. We see things; we watch things; we hear things; we read things. And as that information comes in, we are constantly integrating it with what we already know.”

“Good comprehenders are often making very automatic inferences that they don't even realize.”

“It helps to explicitly teach what an inference is in language that students will understand.”

“It can be much more helpful to ask questions during text if you want to influence that mental picture that the child is building. If you wait until after they've read the text, they've already built that representation and it may or may not be quite what you were hoping they would build.”

“ We're trying to teach kids to read, and a text that is immediately comprehensible leaves you very little to learn.”

“You can increase the learning for most people if you increase the difficulty, because people have to think about it more. They have to work.”

“Reading comprehension is not just a psychological or cognitive action—it's an ethical action.”

“We should be teaching kids with more challenging texts than we have been.”

“Athletes don't do all of their training at peak levels of difficulty; they work up to those.”

“When you are a school administrator, you can't be confused as to what your identity is. People expect you to step in with voice, with passion, with vision, and direct the path.”

“When we talk about knowledge building, when we talk about knowledge acquisition, it's actually predicated on critical thinking. That critical thinking  thinking is not just a higher-level task that we have kids do. It's deep thinking.”

“[Critical thinking] is actually cognitive support. It's a mental act of process in which you acquire knowledge and understanding.”

“During academic discussion, I'm not expecting the teacher to be quiet. I'm expecting the teacher to orchestrate thinking, to hold the pacing of the discussion. You know when to slow the class down, and let them think about this critical idea. You know when to ask that probing question that makes kids think, ‘Hmm.’ I'm looking for those discourse moves that teachers make.”

“When I see questioning that really probes, that's how I know I'm in a classroom where a teacher honors students' thinking. It is an honor to hear what children have to think.”

“That's how you know you're in a classroom with critical thinking: We're not rushing the conversation. We're enjoying it.”

“There's an art and science to teaching, and I think that they're two different things.”

“The importance of modeling can’t be overstated.”

“If we want to get to these higher levels of rigor or higher levels of thinking, that has to be built on a foundation. And when we connect that to something meaningful, the knowledge and the learning get deeper.”

“If you're engaged emotionally, that's going to help you be engaged cognitively.”

“Reading comprehension is the process of taking the meaning from printed symbols on a page and translating them into a linguistic and cognitive code. It's making contact with the processes of language comprehension.”

“Language comprehension is really what leads us to reading comprehension.”

“We've got to start from the premise that reading is language. Without language, there would be no reading. Reading is a process that involves taking language in its written form and translating it back into its original form, which is spoken language.”

“If we go back in development, language skills appear to form the foundation for the ability to decode print, as well as the foundation for the ability to understand what is decoded.”

“Language skills are unconstrained, meaning the sky's the limit. As long as you continue to engage in any sort of way, your language skills can continue to develop throughout your lifetime.”

“We talk about learning to read, but we also need to talk about reading to learn. A lot of what we learn in our lives is through reading, and reading is certainly a powerful driver of vocabulary and language development.”

“Focusing on language is worth the time. …  When we treat it as foundational, that's when we will give more students access to success.”

“If we want better readers, we have to grow better language users.”

“Instead of asking, ‘What do you know about a topic?,' I would start with building their knowledge.”

“We've underestimated the value of writing in supporting reading comprehension.”

“Reading and writing rely on a lot of the same language processes, and writing supports the consolidation of knowledge.”

“When I think of high-quality reading comprehension instruction, I think of before, during, and after.”

“Reading comprehension is the byproduct of a constellation of competencies that are interrelated: your ability to read words, your knowledge of words, and your background knowledge on the topic of the text.”

“Students should engage with meaningful problems, and they should have a reason for learning.”

“It's really important that we help students to develop those foundational literacy skills, because it is just a fact that if you can't read the words, you're not going to understand the text.”

“Reading comprehension will vary based on the knowledge you bring to the task, your interest in it, and your purpose for reading.”

“Syntax is somewhere between the individual words and the meaning of the text. It’s the processing piece that’s going on there.”

“One of the biggest ways that syntactic knowledge can help us with our reading comprehension is through this parsing of the language, which is basically helping us with prosody. And we know that prosody will help us with our fluency with reading.”

“I would encourage teachers to start teaching this by thinking about the most essential building block. ‘I need to build a sentence. I need two parts. I need a who or what, and I need a did what, or I need a noun and I need a verb.’”

“Every language has a syntax, meaning a set of rules within this language that has to do with how we develop thought units. A sentence is a thought unit. So, if we think about syntax as being sentence-level structures in our language, that's one helpful way to think about it.”

“Syntax isn't just for older kids anymore. Syntax is really something that we can start promoting, developing, encouraging, embracing from the beginning.”

“I actually think that as teachers embrace this idea of syntax, they're going to have a lot of fun with it. It's way more fun to talk about the meanings of words than to just decode them.”

“In English, syntax is word order. Syntax is the relationship between the entities in a sentence.”

“If you want to increase comprehension, you need to be explicit in syntax because that's the part of the language system that matters for comprehension.”

“Comprehension is the glue between the words. It's the process of gluing the words together, each word as you go.”

“The process itself [of comprehension] is the moment by moment, really millisecond by millisecond action of gluing words together in order to create a meaning.”

“We need to move the needle on the nation's report card.  We still have two-thirds of our students who are unable to read at what we call proficient. I think the only way that we can really get that number to be closer to the 95% that we really want is to do something new. Syntax is the new thing.”

“If somebody knew how beautiful and systematic the language was, I think you would have people rushing when they wake up to go study syntax.”

“My view of reading comprehension is that it is ‘thinking guided by print.’”

“If we supplement our evaluation with measures of listening comprehension, we can then get a sense of an individual's ability to make meaning. ”

“One of the interesting things about being in this field is that no two people share the same definition of what reading comprehension is. Because we don't necessarily agree as to what reading comprehension is, there is certainly a lot of diversity in the way that we decide we want to assess it.”

“In a perfect world, we would have not just evaluators, but educators who are trained both in the Science of Reading and in assessment so that we can all sit at the same table and participate as we review evaluation results.”

“A lot of what we know about reading comprehension comes from think-alouds, where you ask someone to tell you what they're thinking about as they read.”

“ To model reading comprehension, [try] thinking aloud in front of a classroom of students in a way that is instructive for them, and also authentic to the reading process.”

“Students are making causal inferences in their daily lives, when they watch movies and when they're hearing stories. And so what we're really trying to do is get them to generalize these behaviors that they engage in outside of the task of reading, during reading.”

“In terms of being exposed to misinformation, we see even if people have been exposed to inaccurate ideas—even once—it's encoded into memory; it's potentially gonna be there to influence you.”

“Once the information is in memory, you can't really get rid of it. What you can try to do is make other memories more powerful, more likely to resonate.”

“It feels easy for us to comprehend texts if we're well practiced at it. It feels easy, but it's actually a lot of cognitive operations going on behind the scenes and a lot of years of practice.”

“Sometimes our most effective processes actually lead us to misunderstand. For example, you're really good at encoding information to memory, that's great…except if you're exposed to inaccurate ideas, that's a problem.”

“When you know the science, you should have the autonomy to make real decisions and to solve problems in your classroom. That's how education works.”

“If you're not a fluent reader, you can't be a deep reader.”

“The research is clear that when you start to read expressively externally, then your internal reading voice while reading silently is much more expressive and therefore infused with more meaning.”

“Fluent reading, when it includes prosody, is meaning made audible.”

“I just think it's easy for us to overlook how profoundly groupish we are, how we yearn for group formation, how stories, when they're told well, when they're shared, they bind us together in an experience.”

“When we're sharing this experience that we're able to connect with the text itself, we're able to infuse some meaning through how we're reading that text. That lends us to a depth of comprehension that's really where we want any reader to get to.”

“Comprehension just isn't coming out of a book knowing what the author said; it’s deeply connected to the content that you just experienced.”

“You don't teach orthographic mapping, 'cause, again, that's a cognitive process, but you can facilitate support for long-term storage of words.”

“Never acquiesce to illiteracy. We all, as a community that supports all readers, have to figure out what instruction needs to be provided and what dosage over what duration of time … and it will happen.”

“If you're focused only on phonics and not on spelling, you are going to miss a whole bunch of decoding instruction, word analysis work.”

“You don't need a Ph.D. to have that knowledge. That should come in all teacher training. The complexity of the English language—every teacher I've ever met can handle it once we teach it.”

“To be a reader, you have to be good at two things: word recognition and language comprehension. Both of them are necessary components of reading, but neither one of them is sufficient on its own.”

“The simple view doesn't say that reading is not complex. It just says the complexity is housed in two factors, word recognition and language comprehension. And both of those are complex.”

“If you're a teacher thinking about language comprehension, whatever time you devote to helping people understand language, if you can be effective in doing that, you'll never waste a kid's time.”

“Language comprehension is unbounded. … The knowledge of the world and being able to express the knowledge of the world in language—that's always a key difficulty you work on for your entire life.”

“I got into education because one of my children had a hard time learning how to read. It's an experience that leads you to protect your child, find answers for your child, and then make sure that other kids and parents don't have to go through the same kind of trauma that you went through.”

“Any teacher in a classroom, no matter what content area they teach, is teaching something about language.”

“Reading and writing and understanding language is not just an English language arts teacher's responsibility. It's the responsibility of every educator to communicate their discipline and the words and the concepts from their discipline to their students.”

“[The Science of Reading movement] is not being led by one person or another person. … I'm part of a greater community, and to know that I play a certain role or part in that community actually gives me a lot of inspiration on days when it's really, really hard.”

“Background knowledge—we either mine it or we make it. We either mine it by tapping into what students already know, or we make it by building the experiences they need.”

“The more that we can sharpen our tools and our skillset to be those teachers of literacy, the faster we're going to see improvements in learning in our classrooms. They're not two separate things.”

“I want [the book] to follow the research, but I want it to be simple enough for teachers to execute, [and] also engaging enough for kids to want to do it.”

“If you try to change everything you're doing, you're not going to do anything well. Pick one area of your literacy block you’re really gonna nail. Once you nail that, add another one.”

“Look to those that you trust to guide you.”

“This notion of trying to match kids to books and get everybody to their right level is, at the very least, wasteful. It's not benefiting kids.”

“We're spending an awful lot of time doing a lot of work that is not only not paying off, but it's probably holding a lot of kids back.”

“When we try to ease the path so much so that the kids will hardly even know that they're learning anything, they're probably hardly ever gonna learn anything.”

“Maybe we should be having kids read some of these texts more than once. Maybe we should be doing some of our fluency work, not after we did the comprehension work, but ahead of time.”

“Comprehension is making sense and meaning while you read, so you have the ability to discuss, analyze, and form an opinion about something after you read it.”

“Students who struggle with reading comprehension are often also weak in underlying language and literacy skills that are required of them to create a coherent network of ideas about what they read while they're reading it. [These skills] are collectively being called comprehension micro skills.”

“We often think about comprehension as a product, or something that happens after kids read, but…the ability for a student to build a model or a network of ideas or a picture in their mind happens while they're reading.”

“You know, you don't have to completely change your curriculum; you don't have to completely change the way you're teaching.”

“Your brain is really good at only bringing out the information from long-term memory that is relevant for the context. All of that's happening outside of awareness.”

“When reading is really humming, when it's really working well, it's like visual perception. You're just enjoying the view and you're oblivious to all of the cognitive machinery in the background that's letting you see.”

“Expecting that knowledge-rich curriculum is going to solve all problems… that's [not] what a reading program is. No, a reading program is multifaceted and needs to have lots of components.”

“Knowledge accrues slowly and it's going to take a while. You need to be patient.”

“The greatest thing about the science of learning is that it's never really gonna be finished. Much like the science of reading, it's constantly being updated and it's something that we should be constantly turning to.”

“When we have knowledge at our fingertips—or in this case, in our synapses—ready to be used, we can overcome all these limitations that cognitive load theory talks about.”

“We're kidding ourselves a little bit if we think that we can replace that rich content knowledge with generic skills and generic competencies.”

“Students who have less knowledge or citizens that have less knowledge are more prey to disinformation, because they don't have enough in their schema to be able to question the knowledge that's coming in.”

“Nothing scares me more than students sitting in classrooms trying to go through the motions of comprehension strategies and diligently trying to apply them to reading a text, but not really knowing what this text is about.”

“Literacy for my students meant more than just reading and writing; it was about access, access to the world, and access to knowledge and opportunities, and even independence—finding their voices.”

“You can think of a schema like … mental maps or the frameworks that help us store and organize new information and knowledge. The richer and the more detailed your schema about a particular topic, the easier it is to understand and remember new information about it.”

“Vocabulary oftentimes is the tip of the iceberg of the whole: the conceptual knowledge. It's not a simple definition of the single word; it's really conceptual knowledge and understanding that is represented by the word.”

“The reality is, many of our pre-service teachers are entering the classroom not prepared and they don't know that they're not prepared.”

“It has taken legislation and I don't think that's a bad thing. We need to have some people invested in understanding what the issue is. We've got to stop the bleeding in higher education in order to really make gains.”

“We're not working against each other. We're not in competition. We're all trying to ensure that all pre-service teachers, when they leave the university or the program, that they're prepared. And it ultimately always is going to come down to the children, and we can never lose sight of that. It's about the kids.”

“Don't be afraid to say ‘I don't know.’ I think people respect that, that you say, ‘I just don't know’ and ‘how can you help me learn more?’”

“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.”

“Learning is this fluid thing. It's social, it's dynamic, it's experiential. It is the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding, and developing these behavioral skills, but it's also embedded in this bigger context of your background, your identity.”

“The scientists have discovered that for something to be learned and retained, you need to help the brain do that by practicing, retrieving it from memory, and practicing explaining it in your own words to somebody else asking.”

“Joy in the classroom is a much better context for learning than anxiety.”

“When we're thinking about teaching academic vocabulary, of course in the context of content, [it’s important to note] that it's not just a one time around, that sometimes we have to layer that instruction for deeper and deeper and deeper meaning.”

“ Academic language is really a new language for everyone to learn.”

“I had an epiphany that our students really had to learn writing as a second language.”

“Having students write a lot is not teaching writing. It's just like if you put a lot of books in a classroom, students don't magically begin to read.”

“I often talk to teachers and remind them that they can be their own researchers in their own classrooms—to try something small… . Watch to see the impact that it has; make adjustments when needed, and if it's working for the kids and you're actually seeing outcomes.”

“This is not learned by osmosis, and it's not learned by vague feedback like, ‘Make it better,’ or, ‘Add more details.’ You've got to be very granular. This is not a naturally occurring skill in human development for any of us.”

“What's good for elementary school is good for high school and beyond. The principles of teaching someone how to write coherently and with clarity don't change.”

“To store a vocabulary word, it's not enough to have the meaning. You have to have the entry for it, and the entry for it is the sound form of the word.”

“The greatest gift you can give a kid is letting them know that you see that they're special and that they have something unique that they bring to the world. But the second piece is really, can you help them become a confident, independent reader?”

“ The practitioner doesn't necessarily want to follow the latest research, because you don't know if the latest research is going to replicate or not. Is it going to hold up over time or not? If you always follow the latest research, you can find yourself zigzagging a lot in your practice.”

“There's a good 10 to 20 years of solid work that needs to be done just implementing what we already know from research, what is already the settled science.”

“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.”

“When was the last time in education anybody heard of de-implementation? All we do is pile one thing on top of another, on top of another…then we wonder why it didn't work.”

“You have to distinguish between an initiative, something that is new, and culture, something that's part of what we do every day and that is embedded. That is more important.”

“The problem is this. If you only look at the results, then you don't know what caused it. Somebody has to look at underlying causes.”

“It's really important for administrators to say, 'Hey, I can deal with some chaos. I can deal with students making mistakes.' That's real learning.”

“For this to work, we need both great teachers and great curricula.”

“The single most important thing NAEP cannot do [is that] it cannot in any definitive way explain why scores are what they are or are rising or falling.”

“When was the last time in education anybody heard of de-implementation? All we do is pile one thing on top of another, on top of another, and then we don't then, then we wonder why it didn't work.”

“If you're not gonna have deep implementation, which requires a level of focus and allocation of time and resources, then don't bother.”

“You have to have a singular focus and, and it's gotta be sustained year after year after year until it becomes part of your culture.”

“You have to distinguish between an initiative, something that is new, and culture, something that's part of what we do every day and that is embedded. That is more important.”

“The problem is this. If you only look at the results, then you don't know what caused it. Somebody has to look at underlying causes.”

“It's really important for administrators to say, 'Hey, I can deal with some chaos. I can deal with students making mistakes.' That's real learning.”

“Leaders tend to forget that you get more out of parents if you collaborate with them, if you're honest.”

“With the level and degree of training, understanding, and privilege that I had, it was still—and still continues to be—an overwhelming battle to get your child the services that they need.”

“My calling is so that children can one day stand on their own without scaffolds, that children will one day reap the benefits that literacy is liberty, that children will one day be able to teach someone else the power that only literacy can bring.”

“Think about how many young kids in school right now we are not reaching and that have that feeling that they're dumb and they can't get it. I had one kid say to me, 'Ms. Stewart, I think there's just a secret code.' And I said to him, 'You are right. There is a secret code. It's called the alphabetic code, and you can learn that easily."

“It was really our teachers who led so much of the charge to say, ‘No, this is what we want. We believe kids should be held to high expectations. We believe they're capable, we believe they deserve it.’”

“I have never met a student that did not want to learn how to read or a family that did not understand the importance of their children knowing how to read.”

“We have to listen to our young people in order to be able to move with that sense of urgency.”

"Liberation is connected to our students being literate… In order for our students to truly be free, we [need to] understand the power that reading has in their future.”

“We have to remember who we are serving and why we are serving them.”

“A lot of times when you’re in a large system and you’re leading a large system, it can become very robotic, like a machine. You do this, you get this, you do this, you get this. But there’s a human aspect that if you have not considered that human aspect, you could very well end up in the same place that you’re trying to move away from.”

“And while it’s a five-year strategic plan, we do have a sense of urgency and I’m sure within that there are gonna be benchmarks and hundred-day plans and smaller plans to make sure that we are actually doubling down again on the things that truly matter, that are gonna lead, outcomes for our students here in the school district.”

“If we’re only in the business of educating some students, then what are we really doing? It’s important to look at the students that are not benefitting and really identifying the things that work for that population of students rather than continuing with practices that aren’t meeting the needs of the students we’re serving.”

“Our mission is to educate educators on the Science of Reading because we believe that if educators have that knowledge, they can transform kids' lives.”

“Little by little you can learn to read, you can do something hard and we can do it together.”

“As a storyteller, I can go on a stage and tell a story and know, ‘Oh, that song made somebody connect to a memory,’ or ‘These two hours, they got to escape whatever is bothering them at home.’ That escapism is special and magical. But with reading buddies you get escapism and then you also get impact.”

“God bless teachers. They're incredible. And we are here to help you continue to be incredible. We're here to give you tools to excite your students and just complement everything that you are doing.”

"Our students are the state's greatest asset, and we need to invest in them with all the energy and knowledge we have to do our best to serve them with urgency, compassion, and high expectations."

"If kids can't read, that really keeps them from accessing other content areas like science, social studies, and being able to engage in story problems in mathematics."

"Being able to read is today's civil right's movement."

"With requirements comes resistance. No matter how great the opportunity is."

“The door's been cracked. It has to happen and it has to happen by having relationships with people. You just can’t walk in and just say, you know, this is the way it needs to be done. It's a slow process.”

“If you're trained in a certain way, you're only exposing yourself to those researchers doing those things and that type of information. And so you don't know other sources of information of other researchers and what else might be going on.”

“Learning the Science of Reading is not a, ‘You get it in one day.’ It's not like that. It's a journey and it takes time to assimilate everything you read and then turning that into a practice and shifting the thinking of millions of people.”

“You get better and better at it the longer you do it. So if we just stay stagnant and are closed-minded to new things that are out there, then we can't grow.”

“As a teacher, a Black woman, who speaks Black English, who knows the language, who is very well versed in structured literacy, if I overlooked this, if that caught me off guard a little bit, then that means that could potentially catch someone else off guard.”

“With language comprehension, and considering in your native language, there may be a word that doesn’t necessarily match up with a language that you are learning in the classroom. So you have to then use your incredible cognitive skills that speak two completely different codes, comprehend what is happening, and then tie that back into, of course, the Rope to become a fluent reader.”

“I consider Black English to be a very complex and complicated language…but I think typically in society it has been viewed very negatively. You can see in the media and in research where people have talked about it and used negative connotations. And I think those beliefs from society have seeped into the classroom.”

“A strength of children that are bidialectal is the similar strength to students that are bilingual—they have an ability to take language that is different from theirs and translate it. That right there is an asset.”

“The languages that we speak and bring from home also are not wrong. They’re simply different. And we’re gonna work together so that we take what we know differently and come together with a common language so that we’re communicating with one another.”

“We have got to give our students access to this code so that they can become literate and run our society one day.”

“We have to help everybody kind of collectively align our voices and help people who wanna find out more about this, find out more about it.”

“If the pieces of the system aren't all working together, then you just don't achieve sustained change.”

“Leaders have a critical function. They communicate to everybody in a state or in an organization what's important. You don't have to tell 'em what to do, but you need to tell 'em what the goal is.”

“Teachers aren't the problem. Teachers are the solution.”

“We simply can't call ourselves a great school district unless we get great results for our most challenged and least resourced students.”

“It's not a new thing to be concerned about the low achievement among low-income students but it's a relatively new thing to do something about it.”

"You can think of literacy as a structure, as something that gets constructed in your mind."