"It made me realize I wasn’t the problem; something was wrong with me. I just had a little bump in the road that was making it just a little bit harder for me.”

“It shouldn’t take having to go to jail to get what you need to learn how to read. That’s the bottom of it.”

“Just try to take a deep breath in and ask questions.”

“We just wanted answers and to know what's going on, because I know she's brilliant. I know she's smart.”

“Even when they were trying to help me … it's like they were expecting me to be learning at everybody else's pace.”

“Real talk as a parent: We got to own up to stuff.”

“When a kid can't read and life gets a hold of you, it's like a cycle. Next thing you know, you find yourself in situations that you never would have imagined.”

“Most parents are overwhelmed and they need an ally in the building.”

“I just wish somebody really kind of sat with me and told me that I wasn't stupid and that I was okay.”

“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.”

“[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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

"Kids need to write, they need to write for a variety of purposes. And they also need to write for real reasons, for real audiences."

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”