Reading Recovery Center opens its doors at UW-Madison

The UW–Madison School of Education will launch its Reading Recovery Program with a reception and ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new Reading Recovery Research and Learning Center on Tuesday, Oct. 18, at 2 pm.

The event will take place in Room 430, Teacher Education Building, 225 North Mills St. The public is invited.

The new center – the first of its kind in Wisconsin – will support the training of Reading Recovery teacher leaders, who will spend an academic year at UW–Madison. Following their year on campus, the teacher leaders will implement the program at schools in Wisconsin and beyond, where they will train and support Reading Recovery teachers.

Reading Recovery is a highly effective, short-term, early intervention program for first-grade children who are having great difficulty learning to read and write. Because these struggling readers often have individual differences that cannot be addressed in small-group instruction or in a scripted program, Reading Recovery advocates an individualized approach.

For an average of 12 to 20 weeks, children receive daily, one-to-one 30-minute lessons taught by a specially trained teacher. As soon as students can read within the average range of their class and demonstrate that they can continue to achieve, their lessons are discontinued and new students receive individual instruction.

“Reading Recovery serves as a safety net for low-achieving children and a supplement to a good classroom program,” says Catherine Compton-Lilly, Reading Recovery trainer and assistant professor in the department of curriculum and instruction.

“The new program is made possible by a generous gift from an alumna who knows that a solid foundation in reading is critical to a child’s success in school,” says Julie Underwood, dean of the UW–Madison School of Education. “We’re very grateful for that support.”

Reading Recovery has served more than 1.4 million students since the research-based program was introduced in the United States in 1984. Numerous studies done on the program indicate that it has been effective in closing the achievement gap for ethnic, minority, and low-income students.

Research also has demonstrated Reading Recovery’s effectiveness with English Language Learners. More than 15,000 literacy experts are now active Reading Recovery teachers and the program has trained tens of thousands more teachers in its 20-year history.