PTI Teacher Profile: Enerolina Taveras

Courses taken with PTI:

Tell us about you. What is your current teaching role?

I am a second grade Spanish Immersion Teacher in a public district in Massachusetts.

Tell us in what ways your O-G training has enhanced your teaching.

Orton-Gillingham training has enabled me to have a systematic approach to teach phonics, decoding, phonological awareness, and penmanship skills to my students. As a result, my students have become stronger readers, meeting grade-level benchmarks and experiencing greater confidence as readers and writers.

 In what ways do you implement what you have learned into your classroom teaching?

I follow the multisensory approach during planning and introducing each phoneme. Students are provided with immediate feedback and revisit skills until mastery.  I create a variety of activities to make learning fun.

What types of successes have you seen?  

My practicum students have improved from Level A to Level 28 in a 12-month period. They were able to read on grade level in both English and Spanish.

Do you have any advice for teachers considering O-G training?

Go for it! You will not regret it. It’s a lot of work, but once you apply the principles consistently, the results will come. You will become a more effective literacy teacher and wonder why you went so long without using this approach. Planning will become more direct, explicit, and cognitive based, for sure.

Favorite teacher resource (anything!)

I use Angling for Words (Volumes 1 & 2), which provide tons of word lists and sample sentences for lesson planning.

Tell us a fun fact about you!  Completing Orton-Gillingham training in English has motivated me to pursue it in another language. I hope to become an intervention teacher in Spanish in the not-too-distant future.

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