Hey listeners, a real highlight of 2025 was spending time with many of you during our summer learning events.

I'm watching where people are from. I saw South Africa, Mexico City, Lebanon, the Philippines.

It felt like we had the time and space to slow down and unpack some big literacy topics.

I'm going to do a little bit of an activity with you.

I know it's really hard.

We have like almost 500 people here, but we're going to try this.

That's why I'm so excited we're bringing back the Summer Learning Academy starting this June.

I really hope you'll join me.

Learn more and reserve your spot at amplify.com

slash summer learning academy. To build a meaningful memory of something, you have to think about it.

One of my favorite quotes is from Daniel Willingham, where he said, memory is the residue of thought.

This is Susan Lambert and welcome to another edition of Science of Reading Essentials, a special series of Science of Reading the podcast from Amplify.

On these essentials episodes, we distill the information

from our expert guests on a single topic

so that you come away with the critical information

you need to support students and educators in your community.

And today, we're focusing on the science of learning.

If you look at those things through the lens of cognitive load theory,

we're making reading and writing much harder for kids than they need to be.

What we're intuitively drawn to do as a learning strategy,

re-reading material, practicing something over and over and over again,

those strategies are pretty much labor in vain. They don't stick.

...