A Letter from our Founder

Dear Old Friends, New Friends, and just the Curious,

 I am writing this letter to all of you to let you know about the evolving story of our RAVE-O reading intervention program.  Many years ago I wrote a book that some of you may have read: Proust and the Squid: The Science and Story of the Reading Brain. It began with the following sentence: “I have lived my life in the service of words, finding where they hide in the convoluted recesses of the brain, studying their layers of meaning and form, and teaching their secrets to the young.”

In many ways the RAVE-O program was and is my way of teaching the secrets of the reading brain to the young. RAVE-O embodies the most important processes in the reading brain circuit and most importantly explicitly connects them to each other in every lesson. This approach offers an expanded view of foundational skills that underlie fluency and that  provide a bridge to comprehension and what we call deep reading processes like critical  analysis and empathy.  We often use the term POSSUM (Phonology, Orthography, Semantics, Syntax, Understanding the Alphabetic Principle, and Morphology) as a mnemonic for what teachers teach in the foundational processes. But this mnemonic also applies to our students. In Latin, possum means I can or I am able.  Thus the program uniquely connects what we know about the neuroscience of the   reading brain that, in the process, provides a bridge that connects the most important contributions from the two major methods in the teaching of reading.

With the help of many wonderful people, particularly my colleagues, Maureen Lovett and Robin Morris, and an extraordinary team at the former Tufts Center for Reading and Language Research, we have conducted over twenty years of gold-standard, randomized control treatment studies. Our findings show that early, multi-component interventions like RAVE-O, particularly when combined with systematic programs like Maureen Lovett’s Empower,  make the most impact on the ability of struggling readers to read.

In the most amicable of separations from the recent new owner, Lexia/Voyager/Sopris, RAVE-O is now an autonomous entity. We look forward to creating exciting, new materials based on our research on the reading brain for all struggling readers in the future.

Kindest wishes,

Maryanne Wolf