Sujatha Nair is an Assistant Director (Educational Advisory) and Lead Educational Therapist at the Dyslexia Association of Singapore and a Fellow member of the Register of Educational Therapists, Asia (RETA) with 15 years of experience teaching students with Dyslexia.

Interesting story on how she ended up helping kids with Dyslexia – ‘In 2006, I was helping a friend’s daughter to learn how to read. I realised that the 6 year old girl was struggling to read. I taught her how to read the word “the’ and a few lines later, the word “the” appeared again and she looked at me perplexed, like she never saw the word before! At that point, I did not understand her difficulties, and how I could support her. I started searching online to find ways to help her and used whatever information I gathered to help support the girl’s reading.

At that point, I realised that this is exactly what I want to do, to be there for children to help them with their learning needs.’

Sujatha shares that it is important to have both passion & patience when supporting students with Special Needs. When asked what is the one thing that never fails to make her smile in the work that she does, she says “The “aha” moment that I see in a student who has finally caught or understood a concept.”

To further support her students and build up her professional development and network, she joined RETA, which she feels is an excellent platform for like minded individuals to learn from each other. She especially enjoys the talks and training sessions that RETA organises whereby one can share, listen and learn from experts in their field.

She recommends that if there was one thing that could be done to improve special education in Singapore, it would be to change the student to teacher ratio – 1 teacher to 40 students is not an optimal ratio especially if there are students with special educational needs in the classroom.

Her words of wisdom,

Be supportive and create a supportive environment. Never be too obsessed with the person’s shortcomings but instead focus on the positives.