Developed by New Zealand educator Dr. Marie M. Clay, Reading Recovery 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 an average of 12-20 weeks. Following the initial year of training, teachers continue to participate in ongoing professional development sessions called "continuing contact". They continue to teach for their colleagues and to discuss their interventions. 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 implemented annually in over 10,000 U.S. schools. Reading Recovery is not an isolated phenomenon in schools. Reading Recovery has a carefully designed plan for implementation into existing systems.
A large majority of children who complete a full series of lessons has been successful in reaching average range literacy performance. There is also evidence across several countries that the effects of Reading Recovery are long lasting.
