“I’ve too many good results here with a range of children to not give all the kids an opportunity to do it”.

That's how Bruce Horman, Head of Junior School at Covenant College explained why he decided to have all children in Grade Three participate in the neuroscience-based Fast ForWord program in 2015.

Covenant College is a K -12 school with 540 students in Geelong, Victoria.

For the previous three years Covenant College had focussed the program on students from various grades who were presenting with a range of learning difficulties. They also included some students who were achieving in the mid range of their cohort, but had potential to do better.

Bruce commented, “I've seen that bright kids also benefit from Fast ForWord. It's not just for those kids who are really struggling”.

Mike McKay is a retired superintendent of the Surrey County schools district in British Columbia, Canada.

He was a public educator for 35 years. The area he supervised has over 160 languages spoken. 

You can imagine it would be difficult to measure the potential problems with language and reading development in such a large and diverse region. 

But back in 2008 he attended a conference hosted by Scientific Learning Corporation, where he saw the research behind the Fast ForWord programs. 

When he came back, he asked his board to trust him, and give him $300,000 to get started. It was bold pitch. Mike tells the story of how things have panned out in this Learning Capacity podcast episode:

Dorothy Dore, principal of Urana Public School spoke with The Learning Capacity Podcast about how the school is building student learning capacity with the Fast ForWord neuroscience program.

Urana Public is a small primary school of 26 students (K- 6) located in the Riverina region of New South Wales, 600 kms south west of Sydney.

The school has implemented Fast ForWord for the past five years with excellent results, according to Dorothy.

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Sasha Scott, reading recovery teacher at Welbourn Primary School in New Zealand, was troubled.

She and the school’s associate principal, Jenny, were puzzled why, year after year, there was always a group of students that never seemed to make the progress they should.

Sasha told The Learning Capacity Podcast, “The teachers have all done the very best that they can with what they know. But year on year, those same children pop up again. What could we do differently for these kids, because obviously what we were doing wasn't meeting their needs?”

Searching for a solution for students who were struggling

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“It's here now. If you haven't looked, you may not have noticed it.”

That's neuroscientist, Dr Steve Miller, speaking on The Learning Capacity Podcast about the emerging field of educational neuroscience.

He pointed out that neuroscience, the knowledge of how our brains work, is being applied in a range of diverse fields and has recently come to education.

Research from neuroscience is being applied in:

Celebrating its 125 year anniversary this year, Narooma Public School, located on NSW’s south coast, has seen a lot of changes since the first students started in 1889. The slate boards and chalk in the classrooms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been replaced by electronic whiteboards, computers and the Internet.

The current Principal and teachers at Narooma have not only kept pace with the changes, but they are leading the way by using the latest neuroscience based educational tools to help their students build their learning capacity and read better.