In the late 1960’s Patricia Lindamood, a licensed speech-language pathologist, had a private practice based out of the San Luis Medical Clinic.  While working directly with students, Patricia and her husband Charles, a linguistics professor at Cal Poly University, wrote the Auditory Discrimination in Depth (ADD) Program.  This program has been revised with the help of Charles and Patricia’s daughter Phyllis as the LiPS® (Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing®) program.

Early on in this period Nanci Bell joined Pat as an instructor at the San Luis Medical Clinic practice as she formulated her work for comprehension difficulties (Visualizing and Verbalizing®, V/V®).  The next progression was that this duo of Nanci and Patricia branched out from their medical clinic location and became Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes in 1986.

Word began to spread about the success their programs and instruction were having.  Soon, the San Luis Obispo, California Learning Center was overflowing with students from all around the world.  This demand lead to the first Lindamood-Bell® Learning Center expansion with the opening of Sacramento and San Diego Learning Centers in 1992.

As we began working in multiple locations it became clear that we needed to do more to reach those who were not going to reach us.  Hence, Lindamood-Bell® Professional Development began offering workshops in our unique programs all over the world.

While these were greatly successful in bringing our programs to school children in the classroom, we knew we still had to do more to bring our internal level of quality control into school environments.  Ironically, we learned how to bring our best pacing practices to group instruction through a workplace literacy project with Motorola Corporation.  This served as a great proving ground for having to make large impacts in short time periods, and also earned us Motorola’s Total Customer Satisfaction Award.

The knowledge we gained from these unparalleled experiences allowed us to develop the premier on-site school / district program.  Years before terms like RTI (Response to Intervention) and Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) were being used; we were already focusing our efforts in those directions.  We recognized that as good as our programs are for developing reading and comprehension, it requires a comprehensive approach to helping schools make them a part of their current instructional curriculum.   We have now implemented a version of this unique professional development model in hundreds of schools / districts throughout the US with some expansion into other countries.

Today, we are proud to say that we continue to have hundreds of school-based projects and currently operate over 40 Lindamood-Bell® Learning Centers.  It is with great passion and integrity that we continue our growth to hopefully Create the Magic of Learning for children all around the world.