The project Empowering Dyslexic Teens to Succeed was carried our in partnership with NoticeAbility and funded by Agenzija Żgħażagħ through the Be Active Scheme.
NoticeAbility is a non-profit American organization dedicated to helping students with dyslexia identify their unique strengths and build self-esteem. The program has been promoted to the church schools through the Malta Dyslexia Association and the founder of the organization Mr. Dean Bragoniere has been hosted by the Secretariat for Catholic Education in May 2022 where he had the opportunity to deliver an overview of the program with the aim to help dyslexic students in the middle years. Preliminary training has been provided to two Dyslexia specialist working at the Secretariat for Catholic Education.
The Noticeability project was held between March and June 2023. It is a tailored made curriculum for students with dyslexia. Sixteen grade 8 dyslexic students were the target group of the project. The curriculum consisted of 10 modules spread over 10 weeks. Students had 2 sessions of about 100 minutes per week. The sessions were split into 2 groups: Group A consisted of online Learning. Students had full access to Noticeability’s online learning platform. Each module contained 2-3 videos which provided approximately 20 minutes of learning content. In each module, students explored the cognitive strengths of dyslexia and the social emotional skills required for appropriate classroom participation.
Students learned the four skills or MIND sets which are material reasoning, interconnected reasoning, narrative reasoning and dynamic reasoning. Instructors are encouraged to hold Class A in their school’s computer lab.
Then students shifted to Class B where they applied the knowledge, they have acquired online to a project based, experiential learning process. Students were expected to work in teams of 3. In this project the instructor, provided students with guidance on using active listening, conflict resolution, and negotiation techniques. The educator was provided an online training prior commencement of the course.
This program empowered these students with dyslexia through a blended curricula and it focused on their cognitive advantages associated with dyslexia and used that to engage them in SEL-Social Emotional Learning and EF-Executive Functions.
