The Davis® Mastery for Dyslexia Program is a 30-hour intensive program provided individually by a licensed trained Davis® Facilitator to be completed in one to two weeks. It includes support training for the person providing the follow-up and post-program work. There are three basic parts to the program: Orientation, Symbol Mastery®, and the Post-program work. During the program, the client will learn the tools necessary to control his or her dyslexia.
The first part of the program is correcting perception by helping the client correct their orientation. When a person is disoriented, the brain doesn't see what the eyes see and the brain doesn't hear what the ears hear. In addition the internal sense of time may be off and the sense of balance may be off. Disorientation affects all the senses except for the sense of taste. Symptoms of disorientation could be one's seeing the letters move, seeing different sizes of letters, missing endings of words, adding extra words that aren't there, not seeing spaces between words or lines, etc. Correcting orientation will correct the student's perception.
Once the perception is corrected, the client will learn Symbol Mastery®. Beginning with the upper and lower case alphabet, the client will get rid of any triggers that caused the disorientation in the first place. Letters, words, numbers, and punctuation marks are all symbols which could cause disorientation for a three-dimensional picture thinker. The goal is to erase those triggers so that the client no longer gets disoriented when facing two-dimensional print.
There are 219 words that have been identified as possible triggers because they don't easily have a picture to go with it. Words such as "to, it, of, what, have, from," etc. (sight words) are trigger words which must be mastered to eliminate the trigger for disorientation. Mastering all 219 words are the third part of the program and should be completed with a support person within 6 months to a year following the program. If they are not done, the client will continue to become disoriented and the resulting confusion could impair the ability to get oriented at all.
Correcting a client's perception helps with word identification and reading fluency. Completing the trigger words helps with reading comprehension. What happens in reading a sentence with a word that triggers disorientation is that the movie in one's head blanks out so that at the end of the sentence (or paragraph or page) the client has no idea what they just read. It was simply meaningless words because they lost their picture. Seeing the story in our mind's eye is how we remember what we read and it's how we get enjoyment from reading. If a person says they do not like to read, they probably get disoriented and lose their picture. There's a good chance that person is in the 20% of the population that are 3-dimensional picture thinkers.