Service
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a specific learning difference that impacts on reading and spelling ability and can cause children to struggle with literacy skills development. It has nothing to do with intelligence and is not a disability but rather a different way of dealing with language in the brain.
In fact, as you will see in this, many adults see dyslexia as their greatest strength and have attributed enhanced creativity and problems solving skills to the unique way in which they process information.
However, for children who are developing reading skills, dyslexia can cause a lot of frustration. That’s because the most common form interrupts a student’s ability to split words into their component sounds, which makes sounding out words and spelling extremely challenging.
Languages
“He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“I never teach my pupils, I only provide the conditions in which they can learn”
– Albert Einstein
My teaching philosophy as a language teacher is totally student-centered. I believe that the learning process happens in every student’s brain in a different way, but it is our job to evaluate how the students learn better to provide them with the right activities that make them meet their potentialities and embrace that potential to face the real world in the future. I don’t teach just a language, I show the students a whole new world by using a target language. It is for that reason that I don’t believe in the standardization of the education system.
Having considered all this, in my practice, it is more convenient to foster an active and project-based learning through a communicative and social approach with a didactic and dynamic direct method. The students learn by doing and I think that the combination of these ideas provides the language teachers with the best tools and environment to help students exploit their potentialities while at the same time they learn a foreign language.
“Learning is an experience, everything else is just information”
– Albert Einstein
Learning
As a teacher I use my understanding to support often misunderstood students struggling academically, socially, and emotionally. These struggles may be caused by their learning style, pace and challenges that interfere with their ability to achieve academic success. In addition to struggles with specific content, executive function difficulties in planning, prioritizing, time and organizational management, study skills, task initiation and project follow-through often accompany academic learning challenges making the journey to self-confidence and independent achievement even harder.
My experience working with children and families as a certified Dyslexia Therapist, complemented by my background as an international teacher, has taught me that developing a trusting relationship is the bedrock to feeling safe enough to
• take risks and ask questions that students may not want to ask in school
• learn alternative strategies to master material
• attempt new and unfamiliar material without an inhibiting level of anxiety.
Developing self-confidence, academic achievement and self-esteem is a cyclical process. My priority is to support this process so a student becomes an independent learner. I have deep empathy for the difficulties students experience in their learning struggles and have been recognized for my ability to develop trusting and affirming relationships with students and families, and constructive working relationships with allied professionals and schools.
