Meet Riveting Results®
Riveting Results® was founded in 2016 by Deborah Reck after she had spent 25 years developing reading and writing programs and watching how teachers and students used them in grades 3-12. Concerned with the way that educational technology (some of which she had developed) seemed to distract and distance teachers from students’ observations and ideas, she developed tools to focus teachers on the unique students sitting in their classrooms. She piloted prototypes in Boston and Waltham, MA schools, and in the fall of 2017 started working with St. Augustine Prep, a school with 91% English Learners, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Riveting Results® now provides ninth- and tenth-grade teachers with the content and technology to teach every student how to read advanced texts. With software applications that manage student work and scaffold high-leverage learning experiences, teachers are able to elicit the unique perspectives of their students on carefully selected complex books.
As carefully as Riveting Results® has culled instructional activities from 30 years of program development and classroom experience, we have also selected for students’ close attention a small number of books that have been tested with thousands of students and proven to engage a diverse group of adolescent readers.
Riveting Results® works for teachers and students because the instructional activities develop skills as they help students to engage personally with literature. The more time students spend on high-leverage activities, the more quickly we see them grow. Class time is precious: Thus, the Riveting Results® program intentionally leaves out instructional activities that do not often lead to growth and that can distract students and teachers.
The results at our pilot site over the last four years have been extraordinary: The students’ skills have grown year over year at three times the rate that skills grow nationally, as measured by ACT scores, the Wisconsin state test. As a result, on average, students starting in the bottom 10% of readers have achieved proficiency by midway through junior year. And students who started as proficient students achieved ACT scores in the high 20s and low 30s, proving themselves to be in the top 10% of students nationally when they left high school. The school’s students are 91% English Learners, and in 2021 (a year of mostly remote learning), the state of Wisconsin gave the school a score of 100 (out of 100) on its ELA growth rate.
This extraordinary performance has led to a partnership with the College Board in its efforts to make AP classes more accessible to all students. The College Board believes that the Riveting Results® program enables all students to make the reading and writing progress they need in ninth and tenth grade to succeed in AP classes in eleventh and twelfth grade.
Meet The Team
The Riveting Results program works because it incorporates feedback from dozens of educators experienced in the classroom and in running schools. Unlike other programs that primarily use academic experts to review materials, Riveting Results gets feedback from educators who have actually used Riveting Results in the classroom to develop students reading and writing performance.
contact usGet all of your students reading complex texts.