“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.”

“ 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.”

“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.”