Melissa

Specialist Teaching experience with SEN and Learning Needs: I have a range of experience teaching students with a range of SEN, including dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD and ASD and deliver effective strategies to support them in their learning. I use engaging resources in fun and structured lessons to help students understand tasks/content and develop their communication skills, enabling them to achieve in activities. As I understand the difficulties and challenges children with ADHD and dyslexia encounter, I am able to build a trusting and meaningful relationship with them by using their interests in teaching and checking in with their schedules to ensure they are coping with day to day life and supporting however I can.

Experience tutoring students with anxiety: I have experience with students with moderate to severe anxiety and use a clear structure in my sessions to reduce anxiety and visual timetables to help students know what is coming next in a session. I also use multisensory ways of learning to engage students and teach in a cumulative and sequential way to reduce overwhelm and build confidence, which breaks down learning, reducing anxiety. I give lots of praise to students with anxiety which helps me to build positive relationships with them. I enjoy supporting students with anxiety and monitoring their progression and anxiety levels over time.

Specialist experience teaching students with dyslexia: As I am Level 5 dyslexia trained, I have a wealth of experience tutoring children of all ages who have a range of dyslexic profiles, including difficulties in reading, writing, spelling, memory, comprehension, organisation and processing abilities. My lessons have a structured, cumulative and sequential approach, which includes overlearning many different concepts to support student’s memory. I use online resources such as BitPaper to engage students with dyslexia and using this highly interactive method helps with overlearning and makes it easy for the student to learn online. I integrate multisensory learning, using visual, auditory and kinaesthetic methods to help the student learn.

Specialist experience teaching students with Autism/ASC: I have experience teaching Autistic students, helping them with academic work by working alongside them and supporting them step by step which encourages and motivates them to complete tasks. When working online, using writing frames and colours to annotate work is effective and provides clarity of information for students with ASC. After training as a speech and language therapist, I undertook a research role at Reading University working specifically with minimally verbal and non verbal children with ASD, supporting their language learning through music and speech therapy.

Specialist experience teaching students with ADHD and executive function deficits: I have extensive specialist teaching experience with students with ADHD and help to support their organisation and time management skills as well as academic support with essay writing and preparing for exams. I use structure in my sessions to reduce anxiety and visual timetables to help students know what is coming next. I also use multisensory resources to engage students and teach in a cumulative and sequential way to support overlearning and memory, which are affected by ADHD. I enjoy supporting students with ADHD and monitoring their progression over time.

Specialist experience teaching students with Dypraxia/DCD:  I have a wealth of experience tutoring students with dyspraxia. My lessons have a structured, cumulative and sequential approach, which includes overlearning many different concepts to support a student’s memory. I can support sequential memory by asking students with dyspraxia to sequence pictures/events in a way that will support their memory through collaborative learning. I use online resources such as BitPaper to engage students with dyspraxia and using this highly interactive method helps with overlearning and makes it easy for the student to learn online. I integrate multisensory learning, using visual, auditory and kinaesthetic methods to help the student learn.

Experience teaching students with visual stress: As a dyslexia specialist, I teach many students with visual disturbances, and can assess for visual stress using the Wilkinson’s test. I will be completing Irlen’s visual stress training in the new academic year so I can assess using this renowned process. I regularly source overlays for pupils and ensure I have the background of a screen a colour which makes it easier for students with visual stress to read. I use these colours on the BitPapers I use online to make this easier for the student.

Experience tutoring students with Pathalogical Demand Avoidance: When working with children with PDA, I often use indirect language to encourage them to get started on a task and use a collaborative ‘we’ approach to completing them. I use the child’s interests to motivate them in a lesson and make the task meaningful for them, in order for the child to see its importance. I often use humour with a child and adapt to their own humour, which helps me to build a relationship with them and helps them to feel secure in lessons. I also give the child choices, to give the child a sense of control which helps lessons to run smoothly. I am flexible and adaptable to meet the child’s needs and I change my approach if they feel panicked, so that they feel safe.

Experience teaching entrance exams (11+) and cognitive ability: As a teacher, I have demonstrable experience tutoring children for entrance exams into very competitive independent schools and have a 100% pass rate thus far. I have tutored verbal and non verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and and I break down tasks and puzzles into small chunks to equip children with the skills needed to succeed in these tests. I am training as a dyslexia assessor and regularly use cognitive assessments to find where the gaps are in children’s verbal and non verbal abilities which then helps me to find appropriate activities to complete with a child.

Teaching Maths up to KS3 ability: I regularly teach Maths up to the end of year 9, which effectively prepares students for their GCSEs. I use a structured and multisensory approach to online maths learning, which involves using visuals to help students understand topics e.g data handling, number and measure, and student use and apply their new knowledge understanding in tasks to check they understand and to enable them to perform their maths skills in stages. I often give praise to students to enable their confidence to grow.

Experience teaching Science up to KS3 ability: I have experience teaching primary Science up to KS2 and have extensive experience teaching the IGCSE Edexcel syllabus for Biology, Chemistry and Physics. I enjoy breaking topics into small chunks and asking students to learn actively, completing interactive activities online. I recommend science experiments that can be done at home to check understanding and make science practical when combining with online learning to make science learning motivating and fun.

Teaching GCSE English/essay writing: I have extensive experience teaching GCSE English and can teach a wide range of texts, including ‘Of Mice and Men’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘An Inspector Calls’ and GCSE Anthology texts featuring poetry and prose texts. I often go through poetry/ texts using multisensory teaching online, using BitPapers to ensure teaching is highly interactive. This helps to ensure students understand the texts. I use writing frames, sentence starters, planners and visual resources to help students type essays and creative writing tasks and give a clear structure and examples of how student’s work should be composed. Using exemplars often guides students who find essay writing difficult, and I regularly use these in my lessons which support students.

Specialist therapy experience : I am a specialist therapist as I am a speech and language therapist and am training to be a music therapist and have experience with young people with ASD as part of my training. This has led to my current school role which also involves supporting pupils with ASD and helping to motivate them to complete their studies and succeed in their confidence and independence.

Mentoring and executive function skills experience: I often mentor pupils with high levels of anxiety, frustration and help them to manage their overwhelm by breaking down tasks and activities into smaller chunks to motivate them and make them feel they are progressing with small steps to success. This also links in with executive function support as I am able to monitor and support students to initiate tasks, reduce task avoidance and manage response inhibition.

Study Skills experience: I regularly provide support with study skills and techniques/tools which equip students to do well in their studies and in their life goals, including multisensory resources to support overlearning and strategies to help them with exam revision. Different approaches work for different students, so I am adaptive to the needs of the student.

Developing student’s enjoyment. confidence and independence when learning: I like to focus on my student’s strengths and planning fun, personalised lessons which helps me to engage them in my sessions and has enabled students’ confidence, self-esteem and independence to develop and thrive.

Work Experience History and Skills: After graduating with QTS (Qualified Teacher Status), I started my teaching children with SEND at a very small independent school in Battersea, London, where I worked with children with dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, Autism and Speech and Language impairments. In the two years I worked as a Special Needs Teacher at a prestigious inner London day school, I worked with students who had difficulty accessing the curriculum and had difficulty with social skills due to their sensory processing difficulties, hearing impairments, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, ADHD and ASD.

I supported students through whole class teaching, a 1:1 basis and group interventions, and I supported other teachers in delivering and adapting lessons for specific students, behaviour management strategies and assessment for learning. I also tailored my lesson ideas and resources to meet the needs of the children I taught, to enable them to succeed in their learning and significantly developed my students’ love of learning through praise and positive feedback.

My teamwork skills helped me build positive and supportive relationships with colleagues and senior staff, STL, parents and carers and, as a consequence, which resulted in them having confidence in me which was also seen in the children I taught. I also effectively managed students’ mental health and overwhelm by encouraging appropriate strategies in our 1:1 sessions.

As I wanted to further specialise in SEND and develop my expertise further, I undertook my MSc in Speech and Language Therapy at Reading University, having taken an interest in communication difficulties after working in London.

On the placements on my course, I worked closely with children with ASD, behaviour and emotional difficulties, dysfluency (stammering) and PMLD. I also worked with adults with acquired brain injuries, Adults with Learning Disabilities and dysphagia.

When working with children, I worked closely with other Speech and Language Therapists and I developed both personally and professionally, assessing students, setting SMART targets and planning therapy and activities together to support children and target their needs, which were often detailed on EHCPs. When working in schools, I worked with Learning Support Assistants, Teaching Assistants and other allied health professionals to support students accordingly. Due to the cooperation with the multi-disciplinary team, I learnt a range of strategies to deal with students whose education was impacted by poor communication, concentration and language skills.

I gained experience with a wide variety of tasks as a speech and language therapist, including assessing students using standardised and published assessments and using evidence based therapy to support them.

After training, I undertook a research role at Reading University working specifically with minimally verbal and non verbal children with ASD, supporting their language learning through music and speech therapy. As this was done over lockdown, I developed skills in assessing children and giving music based speech therapy online. I worked with a team of researchers to develop and plan this complex project, and as a result I developed knowledge of research methods and made my own assessments.

While working, I completed my Level 5 dyslexia teaching qualification and started screening and planning/delivering lessons 1:1 with children with dyslexia.

I also became familiar with assistive technologies – such as ACC devices – and softwares such as Nessy, Bitpaper, Microsoft Teams and Google Classroom. I started teaching online in lockdown and furthered my tutoring abilities by tutoring children for entrance exams, including 7+, 8+ and 11+ (including ISEB). My students passed their exams with weekly tutoring sessions from myself.

In my current role as an Academic Support Teacher, I am proud of the effective, working relationships that I have formed with teachers, parents and students with dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD and ASD. I use multisensory methods to help them with overlearning and memory to help them pass exams and achieve their very best. I also mentor students and provide effective study skills support which gives students the tools they need to succeed.

I am excellent at establishing a meaningful and trusting relationship with students, families and other professionals which has amounted to many successes in my students.

Focusing on student’s strengths and planning fun, personalised lessons has helped me to engage students in my sessions and has enabled students’ confidence, self-esteem and independence to develop.