My coaching word of the year is dopamine.

I was watching Dr. Judy Willis’s keynote from the March 2026 Orton-Gillingham Academy conference. Her entire talk was geared around the role of the amygdala in the learning brain.

I was fascinated.

I talk about emotional regulation ALL THE TIME, but Dr. Willis gave me the science to help folks know WHY it has a genuine impact on learning.

Imagine the amygdala like a fork in the road inside the brain.

It determines whether students are able to use their thinking/learning brain or their reactive brain.

We see this in classrooms.

Students who come to us from trauma or with neurodiversity have a tough time demonstrating knowledge and learning in classrooms when the content isn’t appropriately paced or when it isn’t taught in an explicit, multi-sensory way. As anxiety rises, students tend to shut down. Sometimes this looks like the kid who spaces out.

Fun fact: boredom can also trigger a reactive brain response.

So, in the words of Dr. Willis, “How do we get the brain off the couch?”

We increase dopamine.

Dopamine is widely considered a neurotransmitter, something that helps transmit information through the brain. Dopamine increases when we encounter pleasure.

Positive interactions with peers and teachers, music, being read to or told a story, acting kindly, expressing gratitude, humor, optimism, choice, and movement release dopamine.

WAIT!

BEING READ TO RELEASES DOPAMINE!

Dopamine is the precursor for learning. Therefore, being read to helps the brain learn!

Caveat: The books need to be personally relevant. According to Dr. Willis, personal relevance isn’t an “add-on,” it’s a necessity to avoid boredom.

When we open our writing block by reading interesting stories to students in engaging ways that stimulate positive interactions and conversations with peers and teachers, we’re unleashing the dopamine machine.

This holds true for teaching any content.

Reading aloud, storytelling, making connections to personal relevance produces dopamine that allows us to sustain effort.

When we follow up the read aloud with an achievable challenge like using our notes and the key vocabulary to craft a summary, their brains are ready!

I know y’all are tired of me harping on reading books, but, really, READ BOOKS ALOUD TO ALL KIDS. Go wild. Read books aloud in high school!

Dr. Maryanne Wolf, my reading brain research hero, says often that it can’t just be Science of Reading, we have to be delivering, “the full-monty of disciplinary skills” to help kids become readers.

Kids are being inundated with phonics and “fluency,” but they’re not developing the components that they need to be strong readers and critical thinkers.

Perhaps all this sound-production chat is somewhat monotonous and boring. Perhaps the siloed approach to teaching the reading of words isn’t producing enough dopamine!

Dr. Wolf recently said these words that I’ve been saying in my very serious voice for years, “Repeated reading is insufficient when thinking about fluency.” True fluency is not about words per minute; it’s a system that allows for comprehension. “Comprehension is the hoped-for end, not rapid reading.”

Although some students may get a dopamine hit from seeing their words per minute score rise, reading is more than just sounding good!

The spirit of connectivity is essential from day one of teaching students to read. “Foundational skills are useless without the connection to stories from the start,” Maryanne Wolf.

Reading to students allows them access to interesting, complex text with the scaffold of teacher guidance and class conversation.

When we teach kids to read on their own, we cannot ignore the depth and complexity of our language. Words contain multitudes when we place them in context. Remember that roughly two-thirds of our closed syllable words have multiple meanings, or polysemy.

Take the word track for example. When students know not only how to read the word, but the multiple meanings, as they encounter track in text, they are more fluently able to not only say the word, but to understand the meaning, leading to comprehension.

Stories provide students with access to syntactically complex sentences. We, as teachers, can discuss and stretch students in wonderful ways when we read aloud.

This models for students what it means to actually read, deeply.

As soon as possible, the reading of words should be connected to stories for students to begin to read themselves. It is imperative, for the love of dopamine, that these stories are personally relevant and provide an achievable challenge.

We’re providing text that can be read with the tools that the student has in her toolbox.

We aren’t looking for real readers to read quickly like automatons.

We WANT students to stop and ask questions! I long for my students to pause when reading aloud to make a connection to their world or to something they already know. Conversation and personal relevance releases dopamine, which in turn primes the brain for sustained effort.