S1-26. The basic science in reading instruction: Daniel Willingham

Hey listeners, it's Susan Lambert. I really hope you'll join me on June 16th and July 14th for our summer learning academy. But don't just take it from me. Here's Jennifer Pearson, a K-12 English Language Arts Coordinator from Missouri who attended last year. I think as an educator we should always be learning and when we are away from the work during the summer it sometimes allows us to be a big picture, the why behind what we do every day during the school year. Join me and Jennifer by reserving your spot now for the summer learning academy kicking off June 16th at amplify.com/summerlearningacademy. These are challenging times and we respect your unwavering commitment to your students. And amplify we are working especially hard to support you. And as we all grapple with what it means to focus on the science of reading in a new world of remote learning, we're committed to walking with you through the unknown. Welcome to Science of Reading the Podcast. I'm your host, Susan Lambert. Join us as we talk with experts to explore what it takes to develop joyful, confident, and capable readers. Dan Willingham, a cognitive and neuroscience expert and author, joins me to talk about the reading brain, reading research, and how educators navigate messages about what reading instruction should include. Dan has been a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia since 1992 and his research is focused on the brain basis of learning and memory and applications of cognitive psychology in K through 16 education. His most recent book, the Reading Mind, a cognitive approach to understanding how the mind reads covers every aspect of reading. Well, welcome, Dan Willingham. So excited to have you on the episode today. I'm delighted to be here. And I always start by asking our guests to describe how they ended up interested in or thinking about early literacy. And maybe you could talk about how it relates to your broader work. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I did not start in early literacy. And I would say, if anyone listening has any familiarity with my work, you know that I'm very much a generalist. And a generalist really beyond education. So I starting really at the beginning, I began my training as a cognitive psychologist and a neuroscientist and worked in that field for the first 10 years of my professional career. I was a college professor in a department of psychology and just doing basic work, basic research in the brain basis of memory and got interested in education largely by accident in the early 2000s. And started sort of from my home base in memory and attention and turned trying to turn cognitive psychology towards the classroom. What is it that psychologists know about the mind that teachers might find useful? I got interested in early literacy, sort of as a natural outgrowth of that as my, what's the right way to put it, my sort of research interests and applied interests became more focused in my own mind of trying to bring whatever psychologist knew about how children learn to the field of education. Literacy was obviously an enormous part of that, but I did not have a deep background in the psychology of reading. So we're now in the year, maybe 2015 or so. So I spent about a year and a half, two years really immersing myself in that literature. And I, you know, I knew some of it. I had some familiarity with it as you can't, you can't avoid that if you're teaching a course like introduction to cognitive psychology. You need to know something about language. You need to know something about reading. But I spent much more time diving into that and ended up writing a book called The Reading Brain for that purpose. And so that, yeah, that's that's how I got into it. It was, it really was sort of, it was not the starting point for me. And it just became obvious to me that this is a subject of, of urgent concern that was something that ought to have been something I was interested in and working on. So I took it on. Was there a particular situation or something that you remember that you're like, wow, no, I really need to understand it dig into this more? Or was it just sort of a general leaning? I think it was, I think it was a general leaning. And it was also conversations with educators because when I would, you know, tell them the kinds of things that I was interested in, they would always bring up reading. And it did not matter whether I was talking with a preschool teacher or early elementary through high school. Reading is central to virtually every educators concerns. And so it seemed like something that I ought to know more about. And I was hopeful that psychologists would have something to say that was useful to educators. Yeah. Well, you certainly do when you certainly have had something useful. And I'm glad that you mentioned that book, The Reading Brain because it's really illuminating to hear it from your point of view. And I think also really super accessible. And I think, you know, it's one of the things for sure we'll link our listeners to in the show notes. But it brought a, it just brought a new realization, I think, into, you know, this is a, this is an important topic, an important thing that we need to get right. And we haven't gotten it right quite yet. And to be clear, I mean, the book in my more general stance is that is, is very much of a psychologist who's describing what happens in the mind as someone is reading. It's not really about instruction, but it does have fairly obvious implications for what the, some of the goals for instruction probably need to be. And the syntax of that sentence was fairly convoluted. And it's probably because I'm trying to be really careful in how I talk about this because it's easy to get confused. So one, I mean, one starting point when you're thinking about reading, you know, reading is really, when we think about teaching children to read, I think it's really important to remember, there are different goals that one can set for kids as readers. And those will have different implications for what instruction ought to look like. And this is something I think we, we don't talk about enough. And maybe you and I can explore a little more deeply, but I bring it up because, because the reading mind, you know, with sort of agnostic as, mostly as agnostic as to what your reading goals might be. And this is sort of the characteristic of basic science. You're not talking about how the world ought to be. You're just trying to describe the world as it is. And so the reading mind is just saying, okay, here's what, when someone is reading, someone who already knows how to read, here are the mental processes that are recruited. Here's how they work. Here's the role of knowledge and the role of vision and all that sort of thing. And that's quite different than how you, a book about how you get kids to that point. And again, it obviously has implications because it's showing you what kind of the complete package is. And so you have a little better sense of what you're shooting for. Yeah, that makes sense. And I think it relates a little bit to your recent blog, which we'll get to in just a minute. But because you found yourself ingrained in this world of reading science and learning more about it, what's your, you know, I'd be really interested in your point of view on how you view the current science of reading momentum. Essentially, like the conversation has started. It's gotten polarized in some way. People are misrepresentating it. People are representing it appropriately. What's, you know, what's your take on all this? What's been beneficial and maybe some challenges that have surfaced? I think it maybe I'll start with the challenges actually. The challenges for someone who's been involved in education for a while, the challenges are that wow, this feels really familiar. Like, have we not, have we not gotten any farther than this? And as you say, they're, and for anyone who's, I expect most of the people listening know exactly what I'm talking about when I say that for the few of you who may not. This debate about that focuses mostly on a small set of the aspects of teaching of reading, namely sort of beginning readers and teaching them to make sense of print going from letters on the page to words in the mind, not even talking about sort of deeper aspects of comprehension or anything that comes before that, but really that process. That's been the focus of the debate and the role in particular of teaching, um, graphing phoneme correspondences and how central that is. is how systematic it needs to be. That's what people seem to really love to argue about, and that argument's been going on since the 1920s. So that's what sort of makes you sad and exhausted reading Twitter is that that's what the debate continues to be about. Now, the aspect of this that I'm more encouraged about is that it's taken a slightly different cast, the argument this time, because a lot of what people are fighting about is what are teachers actually doing? Because there's, I think, more agreement about what is ideal, and the question is whether or not that's actually happening. So as you noted, there's a lot of misrepresentation on both sides. And so one side says, "Fonics advocates want kids to do nothing except work sheets, and if the kids are miserable doing them, that's maybe even a little bit better," according to the phonics ad. And then on the other side, the people who do advocate for systematic phonics mischaracterize the balanced literacy people by saying all those balancing literacy people want is for kids to sit on pillows and drink hot chocolate all day and look at picture books. And that, to them, is reading. I think we've gotten past that. And we both sides recognize there is value in high quality children's literature. There's value in read alouds. There's value in a literacy block that includes time every day for children to speak and for children to listen and for children to do some writing. And then the question-- and both sides will say, there is a role for phonics instruction. So the big question now, the point of contention is, what should phonics instruction look like? How much time should be devoted to it? And the phonics advocates are saying probably not enough time and probably not very high quality instruction is what's happening. Whereas the balanced literacy folks are saying, that's not the problem. The phonics component is fine. So this a long prologue into why I'm slightly more encouraged because what's bubbling to the surface is, oh, we really need to find out what's actually happening in classrooms. And as a researcher, this is something that has been an enormous frustration to me as long as I've been in education, is with terrible data on this. And it's, of course, a huge problem. There are 14,000 districts in the United States. So characterizing, even at a district level, here's how they try to teach kids to read is terribly challenging. But we've just completely given up on that. But you just can't move forward if you give up on that. That's the problem. Because if you say, well, we need to make things better, then you're contemplating a change. Well, if you don't even know what you're doing now, how do you know what ought to change? So I'll leave it there. I think the most encouraging thing you can say about the current debate. Yeah. Just as an extension of that, I would just love to hear. So you mentioned something about, we really don't have any research on what's happening in the classroom itself. Why do you think that is? It to really do that research right is extremely expensive and difficult. So I don't want to underestimate that. The easy way to do it is to ask teachers, hey, how do you teach reading? That's not a great way to address the question. The reason is that this is going to be retrospective. So you're counting on people's memory. And we know that memory is fallible. And you also have the potential that you're dealing with what psychologists call self-presentation issues. That here you are with this interviewer. And I of course want to look like I'm doing a good job as a teacher. So I may think a little bit less about exactly what actually happens in my classroom and more about what during my professional development session or during my education courses, I was told the ideal is supposed to look like. So the real way you want to do this is have an observer sitting in the class recording what happens. And by recording, I don't mean like videotaping. I mean, with a clipboard and they're sort of coding what's happening. OK, now they're doing a literacy block and it's a read aloud, that kind of thing. So you can see why that would be so expensive to have a trained person spend half a day or a day in a classroom and to have enough people doing that so that you get something that's really nationally representative. That's extraordinarily expensive. There were studies of that sort where you had observers in at different grades between 600 and 1,000 classrooms. That's close to 20 years ago now that we, to my knowledge, we had data of that sort. And so what you're getting at a little bit, I think, kind of relates to a recent blog that you wrote that I'd love to dig in and explore a little bit. And this was essentially, OK, we need to get, if you're going to write about the science of reading, I think this was the title, you need to get your science right. And you made a distinction between this idea of basic science and then applied science. First of all, can you just talk a little bit about what the motivation was to write that and then maybe we can explore some of the contents of that blog? Well, the motivation was exactly the motivation I try not to let the get the best of me, which was I was, frankly, irritated. I read this report and I thought it was really, I thought it was really confused. I thought it made some points that were interesting observations, but it also made some points that I thought were in error. The one that really prompted it was the comment that we'll, we don't really know enough, this is not a direct quotation needless to say, this is from memory, this is sort of the gist of it was, the science of reading is really complicated and people are pretending that we know enough about the science of reading to draw any firm conclusions, but that's not really, that's not really accurate. I thought that was far too negative regarding our state of knowledge. So that's what prompted me to write it. Then when I read the report a little more closely, this is just so people were, I don't think we've named it, this was from the National Education Policy Center report that came out. The blog was in late March and that was, I wrote the blog a week or two after they, they publishes. So yeah, and I thought a significant part of the problem was a confusion of basic science where I think the science of reading, again, this was, you know, what I wrote a book about, the reading mind is the basic science of reading, describing what we know about how people read and applied science and a lot of the recommendations in the report. I thought really had nothing to do with basic science. They, they really concerned, they're more concerned with the National Education Policy Centers priorities regarding how teachers would be treated, how to think about reading and the goals of reading and other things that really science can't help with at all. And there's just no reason to, to bring up science in that context. And so it goes back to an earlier comment you made about, or we talked about misunderstandings and conflating of ideas and sort of the confusion that emerges as we try to sort of dig into what this looks like in the classroom. That's right. And this has been an ongoing interest for me is, is trying to think very carefully about the relationship of basic science and applied science. And education to me is clearly an applied science. And it's a field in which basic science can contribute and applied science can contribute. But it's still only going to be a fraction of what really matters in classrooms. And so the analogy I've drawn is to architecture. Frequently the people drawn analogy to medicine, the basic science going and then physicians sort of drawn basic science and are coming up with new treatments and new medicines and so forth. I think the analogy is really misleading though. Because of the way we think of medicine and actually physicians tell me, Dan, you're thinking about medicine the wrong way. And I'm like, I don't care because I think the analogy still, the analogy, you know, I believe you and I'm in no position to challenge it. But the analogy is pill. I think other people agree with me. But this is the way they think about it. Namely that medicine is sort of science is sort of determinative. to come to medicine that if science figures out the right way to treat disease X is with procedure Y or medicine Z, then you better use Y or Z. That's the best available one. And otherwise, you know, you're sort of guilty of malpractice. And this is what my friend's saying. It's not really like that. It's more complicated. Nevertheless, I think it's probably more definitely more like that than education. As in other words, education is calling not going to be the case that one science figures out, you know, a certain number of things about mathematics. You had better teach mathematics in this way prescribed by science. So you're going to be guilty of malpractice with your kids. I think a much better analogy is architecture. In architecture, you really should know some basic science. You need to understand some basic principles of physics. You need to know some materials science so that you'll know whether this design you're concocting, whether it's going to stand, and whether it will, you know, hold the load of people coming into the building or whatever it is. But science doesn't tell you anything about what the building should look like. It's just a little fragment of the concerns that come in when you're designing a building. And just as we come back to the issue of goals again, you think about designing a building. There are all sorts of, there's not one supreme set of goals. Yeah, probably that it should stand and shouldn't collapse on people with loss of life. But beyond that, you're thinking about what the budget is. You're thinking about the aesthetics of what you want the building to look like. You're thinking about the function of the building. And all of that, that part of the analogy, I think, translates quite well to education. You've got bits and pieces of knowledge about how children learn. And that's important. You know, you have to account for that. That's like physics and material science. But that's just one little piece of the puzzle. And then there's enormous variation in what teachers can do in capitalizing on what we know. And part of their concerns also is going to be what our goals are for our children. That makes sense. So in other words, much of what we're talking about is the context in which we are attempting to function, which can change from place to place. Absolutely. Context is one part of it. And maybe you meant goals as well as part of context. And I would include that. But yeah, and I didn't talk about other aspects of context. But that's obviously enormously important too. What sort of, what are the what are the home lives of most of the children that you're teaching? What sort of support are you or lack of support? Are you getting from the administration from the school board? What's the physical the physical plant that you're operating in? All of those things matter. And as a as a former teacher, I can resonate with that. And I think those that are listeners too that are in the classroom right now can resonate with that. It's sort of the questions that they try to ask, well, but what does this mean for me when I either have this situation or don't have this thing, right? So it's really hard to take a general idea and make it actionable in a variety of contexts. It is. And that's yeah, and I think that's exactly that's exactly the reason is that it's very seldom that there's going to be an idea that is actionable where we can guarantee. And this is this is why it's not prescriptive. It's not just about the goals. I said that, but what I said was really too limited. And and thank you for sort of that elaboration that the contextual piece really matters as well. I'll offer one other way in which I think basic science is really important. And this is something I've written about in the last couple of years is the idea that everybody has a set of beliefs about what kids are like. They they feel like they understand how kids learn. They feel like they understand what kids emotional lives are like, what motivates them and so on. And you have to have that because the education that you undergo in order to become a teacher can't prepare you for everything. I love to tell this story of a friend of mine, his his daughter became a teacher. And I happen to see run into her after she'd been in the classroom for a couple of months. And I said, oh, you know, how how's it going? And she said, well, no one told me what to do about spinners. And she didn't mean fidget spinner. She meant kids. And she she's the second grade teacher. And she's like she had a couple of kids who at unpredictable times of day would get up and go find a blank space on the floor and just start spinning. And so so this is a beautiful example of like, yeah, you know, you were probably absent that day in the seminar when they talked about it. Here's the, you know, the scientifically proven strategy for helping kids who are spinners. So you're going to have unpredictable things and that happened. And in that moment, how she responded to that spinner obviously was influenced by her beliefs about what kids are like and what this child in particular might respond to. So I think what basic science can contribute is they can I sort of call that that mental image of what kids are like a mental model of the learner. You have ideas of obviously every child differs in different ways, but there are some core beliefs you have that, you know, most kids are kind of like this until proven otherwise. Just, you know, we think about that with every object. Most dogs are friendly unless you give me some reason to believe otherwise. And likewise, you have, you know, sets of beliefs about what second graders are sort of generally like. And what science can do is help you think about that. I hope more deeply and more richly and then sort of help shape that mental model of a learner in a way that is going to be more true to your experience. So it's a great example of what you were just saying before. It's like, this is not going to be actionable in any obvious way. Like science tells you, this is what kids are like and therefore you are going to do this. But instead it gives you this sort of background knowledge of what kids are or at least contributes to this background knowledge of what kids are like. And you'll be drawing on that in small ways in many situations. And I want to make a connection with that back to what you said about, let's go back to the architect and that sort of metaphor that we were talking through. So if I'm an architect and I know that I have to take into consideration some laws of physics as I'm doing some design, if we extend that to the classroom and let's just pretend it's the K through two classroom, right? And I'm a first grade teacher. And as I'm working in the context and creating this structure environment for early reading instruction, the assumption there then is that teachers should have had the understanding of basic science of that reading process, right? Right. Yeah. And so I think some of the conversation now is, well, many of us, I will include myself in that and many people that are in the classrooms right now aren't getting that or have never had that. Right. Yeah, exactly. And again, this is what I think has been the most fruitful part of the conversation is just asking that question, well, wait a minute, what exactly? So when you become certified to teach, what exactly do you learn? A friend of mine was certified to teach fifth grade in New York City. And he said, my certification call for absolutely no knowledge of reading instruction. I didn't take a single course in reading instruction. He said, and I taught fifth grade. I could have been teaching for a second graders. I wasn't, but I had, you know, that my certification covered that. Right. So yeah, I think this is a, I think this is a very useful conversation for us to have. Yeah. So that I'm going to use that as a segue because right now it's, well, what's, so if I'm going to learn what science should I go back to be reading and studying up on and who in the world can I trust? Because one person says one thing and somebody else says something else. And you actually wrote an entire book about when can, it's called, when can you trust the experts? Yes. Yeah. I think my mother read that book. It's been my, it's been my goal since it's been on my shelf to like highlight this book to everybody I know because it's a really important topic about how you can actually tell if this is decent science and should I trust it or not. So what was your motivation to, to author that book? Yeah. So my motivation was this, the idea for this book really came from teachers I I was talking with, this book came out in 2012 and that was not that long after I got really serious about education, it sort of turned away from basic research and turned all my attention and education. As a result, I was talking to a lot of teachers and I continually heard from them this frustration, they felt like science or more broadly research was used as a cudgel to get them to do things. So they would be in a professional without meeting or most often, forgive me, my administrator friends, most often it would be like an assistant superintendent or an assistant principal who would get on a hobby horse, they would get really excited about something and they would try and get all teachers in a school or all teachers in a district to enact some strategy in the classroom. And experienced teachers like, "Doesn't make any sense to them, I don't want to do this." And this is when the phrase "all the research supports it" would be evoked and teachers had this overwhelming sense like, "I just smell a rat." Like that, I just don't believe the research, that doesn't seem right to me. But they also, you know, knew A, I'm not really a researcher, and well really A is, I don't have time to like go and dig up the research. But B, if I did, I'm not a researcher, I'm not sure it would make that much sense to me. So I had this idea to write a book that would sort of be a cheat. It would be a way of evaluating the likelihood that something was really research based without reading all of the research. And I'm very upfront about the fact that, you know, it is a shortcut and it's, for that reason, it may well be unreliable. But yeah, I thought it would be, I thought it would be of interest to teachers because they were so frustrated by this, all the research shows it, phrase they were hearing all the time. So in thinking, well, by the way, it's been very helpful to me. So if I'm your only fan on this book, I'll thank you. Oh God bless you. That's great. No, I already told you my mother liked it. Oh, bless her heart. So as you're thinking back on this book now, in what ways do you still think this is relevant? Oh, I think it's absolutely relevant. I think it's, you know, because we have all the same problems. I mean, one of the, the same problem that I described, which is that you've got practitioners who do not know where to turn to get reliable information about research. So the way I framed it in the book and I still think I absolutely think this is relevant. This is, I think unique to education. The problem is not unique to education, but most other fields have solved this. So the problem is, you're a practitioner. You go to school to learn your practice. You are educated in what are presumably the most up to date methods and then you're in practice. Research is marching on and what you learn in school may become outdated. How are you supposed to know whether or not that happens? Well, if you're in medicine or accounting or dentistry, you have the same problem. And the way those fields have dealt with that problem is they've created institutions that make sure that practitioners have access to reliable summaries of research, usually annually. And so the institution will, either the institution itself will hire or they will oversee the production of these annual summaries. So they're very well known in medicine. And I've forgotten now the name, but there's one series in particular published by Little Brown that is really renowned. And it comes out as sort of a spiral bound volume each year. And there's one for internal medicine and one for surgery and so on. And basically, someone with a lot of expertise is spent the year digging into literature and deciding, is the way we treat strep throat still the best way? Or is there, does the weight of evidence now indicate we should do something else? So it relieves practitioners of the job of keeping up with the field and education relieves teachers to fend for themselves on this score. And there's some notion that, well, this is part of being a professional. It's not. I mean, it's ludicrous to think you can be in practice all day and then go home and start reading journal articles for God's sakes. I mean, that's an unreasonable expectation. So it seems to me that the obvious candidates for this would be professional organizations. The teachers unions have expressed very little interest in this sort of work. The AFT has done some of it. The NEA to my knowledge is done next to none. But there have traditionally been much more interested in, you know, operating as labor organizations and their concerns are more working conditions and salaries and that sort of thing. Other professional organizations could take it on, so National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, those are smaller professional groups. They've not taken it up either. But that's the problem as I see it. And so that, to me, is the ideal solution. And until then, everyone should just buy my book. They don't have to read it. It's okay to just buy and not read it. But they really should buy. Well, that makes me laugh because I just got this vision in my head of buying a book and putting it under your pillow and, you know, hoping that you wake up the next morning and it's just in your brain. But, you know, Osmosis is, you know, you never know if that could happen. Sleep Osmosis. It's not been tried enough. But it is very true. I mean, I remember as a teacher that you can't even get access to the articles unless, you know, you have access. You pay it to get access to the articles. So just even to get access to research articles is one thing to be able to actually engage with them and read them as another thing. And so it is frustrating. And bear in mind, I mean, it's how ludicrous this idea is that teachers should keep up because of the diversity of fields that you would want to keep up on. You know, set aside if you're a second grade teacher so that there's math and English language arts and science and all the rest of it. If you're, you know, high school social studies teacher, you're trying to keep up with all the high school social studies stuff. But then you're also trying to keep up with literature on motivation and what's happening in emotion and what's happening in the sleep literature. Right. It's just everything touches education. So it's, you know, it's an impossible job. Yeah. Yeah, that's so true. I'm going to take a little bit of a turn here because the hot topic these days is actually all about remote learning. Given that we're in the school closure environment, unclear what's going to happen and back to school. So what do you think we should be keeping in mind as, you know, as educators, we're trying to teach remotely, either with technology or we're having to put together packets. So, you know, kids are still doing stuff at home. Yeah. So, big, big takeaways there for us. So I want to be clear on that. That's a big question, by the way. Yeah. No, and I want to be clear. I'm very much shooting from the hip here. I mean, this is, and I think almost, it's hard for me to imagine anyone who except possibly a historian. You know, you don't want to write off school indefinitely. But you have to figure out some way of making remote learning work. And as we've seen, that's enormously challenging. Yeah. And I wonder, you know, I'm just thinking about, again, the early learners learning to read are K, one in two kids compared to maybe middle or high schoolers. So those mislearning opportunities are going to be very different between grades. They may be. But they, it may also, I mean, if I heard you write it, it sounded like you were suggesting that, well, the older kids can kind of learn on their own because they're able to read. Is that what you were suggesting? Well, I'm more suggesting that maybe remote learning is easier to deliver to kids that are in middle or high school that don't need maybe some explicit instruction in the code knowledge or in phonics. Maybe that's a lot harder to do remotely. It could be. I mean, I think that I would not have, and again, I'm totally shooting from the hip here. So this may be really naive. I mean, but I think that the greater challenge with the younger age is that they're younger and they're just not used to being on task for as long a time. They need the teacher needs to be there to monitor how it's going and to, you know, change direction as they drift away. Whereas the older you get, the more sort of self-regulated you are and the longer you can stick with a task. that's set for you. In terms of kind of needing explicit instruction and needing feedback, there are some tasks that we could think of in high school where you've got exactly the same problem. That the ideal is that the instructor is right there on the spot as you're doing something, providing immediate feedback so that as you take a non-optimal path, it can be pointed out to you. Oh, well, here's why here's another way of thinking about that or whatever the feedback might be. That makes sense. Well, it's been a real pleasure to chat with you today again. Thank you so much for joining us and I'm wondering if you can mention for our listeners ways that they can follow your work. Oh, sure. While Daniel Willingham.com is my website and that has anything that I've written to which I own the copyright, you can download there. And then on Twitter and on Facebook, I'm D.T. Willingham and I post both places fairly frequently. Great. Well, thanks so much. It was such a pleasure and best to you. Ah, thank you so much. I had a lot of fun. We're so grateful to our amazing guests today and to all of you making a difference in the lives of students every single day. Be sure to check the show notes for resource links from today's podcast and we want to hear your stories and successes. Follow us on Facebook at Science of Reading the Community or if you're looking to help implement the Science of Reading, send an email to S-O-R Matters at Amplify.com. Tell us what guests you think we should book or tell us about the research that really excites you. And be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, I'm Susan Lambert.