A featured speaker at national and regional conferences across the country, her mission is to combine current neuroscience with best practices in teaching to develop powerful learning strategies that build language and literacy skills in all content areas. Her groundbreaking book Aim to Grow Your Brain: The Secret Mindset of Underachieving Students was released in October 2009. Her current research and newly released book: Making Words REAL- 6 Steps to Building Academic Vocabulary focuses on combining neuroscience research with best practices in teaching to accelerate the acquisition of academic language. Her motto is, "if you grow word knowledge, world knowledge will follow."