Pampa ISD implemented the Reading Recovery program nine years ago. Roberta Hendricks is the Travis Reading Recovery Teacher.

Reading Recovery, developed by New  Zealand educator Dr. Marie Clay, is a short-term intervention for children who have the lowest achievement in literacy learning in the first grade.  Children meet individually with a specially trained teacher for 30 minutes each day for and average of 12-20 weeks.  The goal is for children to develop effective reading and writing strategies in order to work within an average range of classroom performance.  Reading Recovery is also available to children whose initial reading instruction is in Spanish; Descubriendo La Lectura (DLL) is well established in a number of sites across the United States.

In 1984, Ohio State University began training teacher leaders for Reading Recovery for the first time in the United  States.  There are now 22 universities that serve as teacher leader training sites in the United States.  More than 1,000,000 children have received Reading Recovery instruction in North America since its introduction in 1984. 

Reading Recovery is an early intervention.  Proficient readers and writers develop early.  There is strong evidence in the research literature that retention in grade level and long-term remediation efforts do not enable low-progress children to catch up with grade-level peers so that they can profit from classroom instruction.  There is also evidence that school failure leads to lack of self-esteem, diminished confidence, school dropout, and other negative outcomes.  It is, therefore, necessary to redirect educational policy and funding to the prevention of reading failure.  Reading Recovery has a strong track record of preventing literacy failure for many first graders through early intervention.

The key to the successful implementation of Reading Recovery resides in the training model.  Three levels of professional staffing provide a stable training structure: university trainers who train and support teacher leaders; district-or site-level teacher leaders who train and support teachers; and school-based teachers who work with the hardest-to-teach children.

Initial teacher training is for one academic year with no loss of service to children.  As teachers are trained, they simultaneously implement the program with children.  Extensive use is made of a one-way glass screen for observing and talking about lessons with the children.  Teachers become sensitive observers of students’ reading and writing behaviors and develop skill in making moment-by-moment analyses that inform teaching decisions.

Following the initial year of training, teachers continue to participate in ongoing professional develop sessions called ‘continuing contact’.  They continue to teach for their colleagues and to discuss their programs.  Continuing contact sessions provide collaborative opportunities for teachers to  remain responsive to individual children, to question the effectiveness of their practices, to get help from peers on particularly hard-to-teach children, and to consider how new knowledge in the field may influence their practice.

Reading Recovery is not an isolated phenomenon in schools.  Reading Recovery has a carefully designed plan for implementation into existing systems.  The success of any intervention such as Reading Recovery is influenced by the quality of the decisions made about implementation.

Replication studies document outcomes for all children served in Reading Recovery.  Consistent outcomes have been shown for children served in English and in Spanish.  A large majority of children with full programs have been successful in reaching average range literacy performance.  There is also evidence across several countries that the effects of Reading Recovery are long lasting.