Aishah is a Lead Educational Therapist, who has been with the Dyslexia Association of Singapore Limited (DAS) since 2007, and a Fellow member of the Register of Educational Therapists, Asia (RETA) since 2014. She was motivated to be a RETA member as she feels that RETA provides her a platform to reach out to younger Educational Therapists to share educational skills and strategies for teaching students with special needs. As a member, she gets the opportunity to attend the RETA sessions shared by experts in the field of special education and gain valuable knowledge that helps her improve her own educational knowledge and teaching skills.
She is a pioneer member of the Mathematics core team at DAS, providing Mathematics intervention for learners with dyslexia. She has years of experience with curriculum planning and designing appropriate teaching approaches and lesson materials in line with the Singapore Primary / Secondary MOE school Mathematics curriculum.
Aishah aims to meet the diverse needs of students of varying abilities so that they can confidently work out computation sums as well as word problems while applying appropriate heuristics.
By delivering these pedagogical skills to her students, she has played a crucial role in helping students at the DAS excel in their school mathematics examinations. She strongly believes that students learn mathematics concepts readily when Mathematics is made meaningful and fun for them.
Aside from her teaching responsibilities, Aishah has experience conducting talks and workshops to parents and students. She also plays a key role in coordinating and facilitating teacher training for new Mathematics teachers.
When asked, “What is the one thing you would do to improve special education in your country?”, Aishah shares that she would like to be part of a school management team to help ensure that students with special education needs study comfortably alongside non-special needs students in the same classroom. She would encourage classmates and schoolmates to buddy the special needs students to help them manage daily classroom learning and do activities with them (eg. eating together at recess and participating actively in school team events). She would also like to see that teachers are professionally trained in special education and can effectively teach quality lessons to the special needs students and non-special needs students simultaneously.
What made her choose to be in the field of Special Needs? Aishah shares that she is able to make connect with students and their parents. She enjoys the opportunity of discovering how best students learn, their learning styles and how she can best teach them the mathematical concepts to suit their learning needs.
Her words of wisdom,
Show acceptance, love and care; be sincere in your communications; show respect and be patient.