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The Dyslexic Blueprint for the Future of Education

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Davis Concepts for Life

The Gold Standard Programme For Attention Focus,
Executive Functioning and Emotional Intelligence

Not every learning difficulty has a name.

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Sometimes, individuals of many different cognitive, emotional and academic profiles can feel mysteriously blocked from participating fully in the life they have chosen. The same problems not only keep recurring; they grow and accumulate, and nothing "works" to solve them. Actions performed with the best of intentions keep producing the wrong outcomes. Parts of life, or all of it, can start to seem baffling or even scary.

Davis Concepts for Life℠ — A Road Map for Participating Fully in Life

Davis Concepts for Life offers a gentle and deeply experiential learning path to assist any individual who is open to self-development to claim or reclaim full participation in the life that they choose.

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Davis Concepts for Life assists individuals to create meaningful change in their lives by exploring and mastering the mechanics that make up motivation and self-responsibility.

Individuals who experience challenges with executive functioning skills, stress, anxiety, reduced focus, self-regulation, and behaviour management, will find this programme particularly beneficial.

People who struggle with forming and maintaining positive relationships can also benefit from this program.

What is involved in a Davis Concepts for Life Programme?
Image by Nathan Dumlao

Step 1: Self-regulation strategies and Tools

These equip the individual (and their support person, if necessary) with a set of self-regulation strategies that can be easily learned and applied. These include:

Auditory Orientation – the participant listens to a specifically engineered sound through headphones leading up to and, if necessary, during programme sessions. This auditory stimulus – affectionately referred to as the ‘Davis ting’, was designed by Ron Davis to help each participant to develop accurate, stable perceptions and the ability to achieve a calm focus.

 

Release – a breathing tool for relaxation, relieving tension and to help manage stress and anxiety levels.

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Dial – a mental imagery tool used to help monitor energy levels and maintain rapport with others.

 

Auditory orientation fine-tuning – this consolidates the feeling of focus established by the Auditory Orientation, and enables the participant to achieve and maintain focus without needing to use the auditory orientation sound.

 

Koosh ball exercises – a fun, interactive way to practice maintaining focus, while strengthening neural pathways and improving balance and co-ordination. These exercises can be practiced with the assistance of the Davis Facilitator and/or the support person.

Step 2: Davis Life Concepts 

This component of the programme instils missing life concepts by using the multisensory medium of plastilina clay to model core concepts and capabilities, including:

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  • Self, change, consequence, before and after, cause and effect, time, sequence, order and disorder

  • continue, survive, perception, thought, experience

  • energy, force, emotion, want, need, intention

  • motivation, ability, control and responsibility.

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Image by Juliane Liebermann

The most effective way to consolidate this learning is through experience. After each concept is created in the clay, the participant explores the concept in the real world alongside their Davis Facilitator or support person. The aim is to have many varied experiences of how the concept exists in the individual’s day-to-day surroundings.

 

These experiences are essential, as they enable the participant to integrate the concept into their own identity and establish an internal ‘filing system’ that provides the foundations for future thinking and behavior. 
 
​Physically interacting with these concepts in the environment facilitates a deeper understanding of these life’s lessons. It also enables the participant to transfer their understanding across situations within their daily life, which develops their executive functioning skills.

Step 3:  Implementing meaningful change

This stage of the Davis Concepts for Life Programme focuses on helping the individual to apply the concepts in their life to create meaningful change. The desired changes will depend on each person’s specific needs, capacity and situation.

 

Establishing order in the physical environment

Learning how to use the concepts to establish order, determine order, and create and maintain order.

 

Creating new behaviours

Image by Ross Sneddon

Exploring behaviours that have had negative consequences and using the learned concepts to create more positive outcomes and strategies.

 

Developing self-responsibility

Identifying which life concepts may have been missing or only partially integrated in the person’s life, and learning a strategy to foster self-responsibility by applying these newly mastered concepts in real-world situations.

 

Strengthening executive functioning skills

Developing and integrating the core concepts to improve self-regulation skills.

 

Improving social integration

Exploring concepts that create foundations for positive, healthy relationships and behaviors with others.

 

Read the Program Delivery Standards.

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What kind of results do people see with the Davis Life Concepts programme?

 

Individuals who have completed this programme experience many positive changes, including:

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  • increased self-awareness 

  • better able to manage stress 

  • an increased ability to focus for periods of time 

  • able to monitor and self-regulate their energy levels

  • improved ability to listen and take in what is being said

  • greater insight into the relationship between cause and effect 

  • improved time management

  • better organization and ability to complete tasks

  • the ability to establish order in their environment and daily life 

  • awareness of the role that emotion plays in self-motivation 

  • the ability to apply a framework to establish self-responsibility 

  • recognition of different types of relationships, and what constitutes acceptable behaviours within them, and  

  • the enhanced ability to make decisions based on what is right or wrong for Self. ​

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This text taken and adapted from source text at https://www.rdautismfoundation.org/davis-concepts-life-program

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