Most organizations are fighting AI in the room. I built a framework that flips that entirely.

Instead of banning it, blocking it, or hoping people ignore it, this playbook shows leaders how to use AI as a teaching and learning accelerator. The result is not students or employees doing less thinking. It is leaders asking better questions, and knowing immediately whether the work was done.

A six-step protocol, evolving prompt library, and live embedded demo. Delivered at the International Leadership Association Virtual Summit, Spring 2026. Built for higher education and immediately applicable to any organization navigating AI adoption right now.

Most literacy tools teach a skill and move on. I built something different.

Reading For All™ follows two characters, Abby and Otto, from their very first CVC words all the way through Latin roots and Greek combining forms. As the curriculum grows, they grow with it. That is not an accident. It is the architecture. A learner who starts here at age five and stays has a relationship with the material that deepens over time.

Every lesson is fully multisensory: a teaching video, an original song, a custom AI-powered practice app, and a decodable reader. It's not because multisensory is a trend but because the Science of Reading tells us that when children learn through multiple pathways at once, mastery happens faster and sticks longer. The goal was never just competence. It was joy and mastery together.

Every element was designed, produced, and deployed by me. No agency. No developer. No external team. This is what it looks like when someone builds a foundation first and lets everything else grow from it.

This is what AI enablement looks like in practice.

This is mine, a complete professional website, built and deployed in five hours. As you picture what your team could build with that same capability, consider what stays in house: the budget, the timeline, and the competitive edge. I can show them how to get there.

HTML, GitHub, Cloudflare Pages, custom DNS configuration, live worldwide. No agency. No developer. No external team.

Three highly reputable child psychologists told me my son had ADHD and ODD and needed medication. I did not believe them. I kept looking.

The fourth doctor, Dr. Melanie Powell, identified what the others had missed: a gifted child with dyslexia. That diagnosis did not just change my son's life — it ignited everything that followed.

I picked up The Dyslexic Advantage by Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide and I did not stop. What I found in those pages reframed everything I understood about how certain brains learn and lit a fire that eventually became a law.

Susan Barton, my mentor and the creator of the Barton Reading and Spelling System, asked me personally to start Decoding Dyslexia NC. I said yes while finishing my dyslexia screening practicum. When the founding members stepped away shortly after, I reorganized the chapter alongside the Eakins and several others and led it for six years as State Director. Leaving was never an option.

As that work grew I became the only Decoding Dyslexia representative in the country invited to the Dyslexic Advantage Conference. I was invited to host a breakout room at that conference. Across the table sat Susan Barton of Barton Reading and Spelling System and James Wendorf of Understood.org. Dr. Fernette Eide later collaborated with me directly on gathering the data we brought to Dr. June Atkinson and the North Carolina legislature.

That data helped seal the passage of NC HB149, North Carolina's first dyslexia identification and intervention mandate in history, signed July 20, 2017 and delivered in person to Superintendent Mark Johnson.

114–0 in the House. 47–0 in the Senate, not because the politics were easy but because the people were moved.

What began in NC as a grassroots movement grew into an independent chapter network spanning all 50 states and Canada. Each state led its own fight. NC led first.

One in five people has dyslexia or a related learning difference. Those people are in your workforce right now, and the shame that started in second grade, when reading felt impossible and everyone else seemed to get it, does not disappear when someone gets a job. It hides. It adapts. It quietly shapes how people show up, how much they risk, and how willing they are to try something new.

Suzy the Struggling Reader was written for those children — a composite of the many students I have taught through the years, and of myself, and of my son. I wrote it to give a struggling reader a story that finally reflects their experience and affirms what I have always known to be true: the capability was never the question. The belief was.

I have been at the intersection of learning differences and technology for almost two decades. What I know from that intersection is this: AI can do extraordinary heavy lifting for neurodiverse learners. It levels a playing field that has never been level. When someone who spent their whole life feeling behind finally feels equipped, something shifts that no training program alone can produce.

Before children can learn to read they have to believe they can. Before employees can adopt a new technology they have to believe they belong in that future. That is the same work. It has always been the same work.