The Science of Learning provides valuable insights into the cognitive processes involved in acquiring knowledge and skills. This includes the research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and educational theory to inform teaching practices. Our literacy program at Daylesford Dharma School is rooted in these evidence-based practices and we work to align our practice with these key principles. Here’s how we integrate these principles into our teaching:

Metacognition: This involves teaching children to develop awareness about their learning processes. Teachers reflect with students on how they feel most comfortable learning, support them to recognise and set learning goals, monitor their progress objectively with explicit, process-based feedback, and brainstorm how they can modify strategies when faced with new challenges. 

Active Learning:  Children learn best when actively engaged in the learning process. Our classrooms buzz with engagement as students participate in hands-on activities. Active learning encourages student-led activities, discussions, and problem-solving tasks that stimulate critical thinking and deep understanding. The Inquiry unit of work in our curriculum strongly promotes this type of learning for our students and also provides quality, authentic opportunities for children to apply their learning to their school and wider community. This enables them to experience putting their learning into action in a way that supports positive outcomes for their communities. Our Australian Dharma Curriculum also targets the development of metacognition and active learning. 

Feedback and Practice: Providing timely and constructive feedback from a relationship of trust with a teacher is crucial for learning and reading. Providing ample opportunities to regularly practice new skills reinforces learning and helps consolidate new knowledge and skills as mastery. 

Transfer of Learning: Helping children connect what they’ve learned to real-life situations fosters transferable skills and enhances long-term retention.  In our school, you will see this in action via teachers supporting student-led learning projects in the Compassionate Citizenship program,  in our Bush School curriculum, and in our excursion-rich approach to learning that is connected to our Inquiry investigations.

We are an agile school with highly motivated teachers who plan each term to stimulate our students in this way to support learning relevance and consolidation. 

Central to our literacy program is our Evidence-based approach which delves into the mechanics of learning to read and comprehend written language. Our approach embraces the core components of the Science of Reading, ensuring that students develop essential reading skills systematically and effectively. Here’s how we address each component which is referred to as The Big 6.

1. Oral Language
2. Phonological Awareness
3. Phonics
4. Vocabulary
5. Fluency
6. Comprehension

How we apply The Big 6 at Dharma

In our Foundation to Grade 2 classes, we place a strong emphasis on building phonemic awareness which is the ability to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds. We practice this skill through daily activities such as blending, segmenting, sound isolation, and manipulation.

Daily systematic synthetic phonics lessons also form part of our literacy learning, where children are taught letter-sound relationships and spelling patterns. A daily review of previous learning is built into these lessons to support children in building mastery of these skills. Once children can map sounds to letters they have the building blocks for being able to decode text. 

Fluency lessons are built into our literacy routine. In Foundation to Grade 2 classes, students focus on sounding out words targeted at their current letter-sound knowledge. They also use targeted decodable texts, word lists, and sentences tailored to build their recognition and speed. This fluent reading involves not only accurate decoding but also automaticity and prosody (intonation and expression). Practices such as repeated readings and guided oral reading help to establish fluency. In our 3-6 classrooms fluency continues to focus on word recognition and language comprehension. The less a reader needs to focus on word recognition and decoding, the more they can direct their attention to understanding the meaning of the text. 

The core purpose of learning to read is to be able to comprehend and apply what we read. Vocabulary is explicitly taught across the school and is often linked to our core learning areas such as History, Geography, Science, or Awareness programs. When looking at vocabulary we explore the meaning of words in context and then apply them to reading activities. In our middle and upper classes, students explore word origins and the use of suffixes and prefixes to alter the meaning base of words.  A strong vocabulary is essential for comprehension. 

Comprehension
Comprehension is taught through the use of a range of texts which are often linked to our Inquiry investigations. In these lessons, we support students with building their background knowledge on a topic and apply language structure and vocabulary knowledge to enhance their literal and inferential understanding. 

We use Scarborough’s Reading Rope to guide the skills we need to build for language comprehension.  Teaching children comprehension strategies such as predicting, summarizing, questioning, and visualizing helps them understand and analyse texts more effectively. 

At the Daylesford Dharma School, our teachers also use an approach called the simple view of reading (SVR).

This approach provides teachers with a tool to understand how students are progressing with the two key factors of success: reading accuracy and language comprehension. Once teachers are aware of how students are tracking in these two areas, differentiated teaching can then be developed for students.  Reading is a complex cognitive process. It involves reading accurately and with understanding. The SVR considers both of these factors.

Gough and Tumner (1986) developed this Simple View of Reading (SVR), not because reading is a simple process, but rather because their model is a conceptually simple representation of what a beginning reader needs to master. So helpful!

At our School, we bridge both the Science of Learning and the Science of Reading theory into practice as we implement educational evidence-based strategies in our classrooms. Our structured literacy approach ensures that students receive explicit and systematic instruction in the key literacy areas of reading, writing, and spelling. The reading skills we build with students are then applied and practiced in other aspects of our learning areas such as Humanities, Maths, and our Awareness program. By fostering a rich literacy environment and providing differentiated instruction tailored to student’s needs, we empower young readers to unlock the complex process of learning to read that supports the joy of learning and can bring academic success and achievements. 

As we continue to refine our literacy program based on the latest research findings, we remain dedicated to equipping our students with the skills and confidence they need to thrive in their reading journey and beyond. Together with our committed educators and supportive parents, we are shaping literate, curious, and lifelong learners who are prepared to navigate the complexities of the world with confidence and competence.