Instructor Spotlight: Lisette Ayala
Lisette Ayala working with a student.
This month we sat down with Lisette Ayala, a paraprofessional and Reading Rescue instructor at PS 20 in Manhattan. She started working at the Dept. of Education 17 years ago and has instructed over 30 students over the course of her 7-year literacy intervention journey!
Lisette learned about the varying needs of students while working in special education classrooms: “I learned a lot during that time, and as a mother of a dyslexic son, I started to see how different teaching styles and supports are needed for different students.” Lisette attributes a lot of the program’s success in PS 20 to the support and buy-in from the principal Sarah Pinto and teachers. At first some colleagues of hers weren’t sure whether their students might benefit from the program but she said that now some of them “fight” over which of their students will be selected for intervention next!
“I love that I have gained a new skill from this experience. I can pull up a chair with a student and work directly with them, and this is a skillset I have now – a skill that I have for life and that I can take into the classroom with me. I am so thankful for the experience.”
PS 20 is like most NYC schools, in that many families cannot afford a private reading tutor/interventionist for their children, so Literacy Trust’s programming and ongoing support provides an opportunity for struggling readers to catch up before it’s too late. This gap in resources and funding has been further exacerbated by COVID’s effect on school closures and hybrid learning models. Lisette noted that the technical difficulties and trauma of COVID set a lot of her students back. Sometimes students were not able to log-on consistently. However, other students were so committed to the sessions that they would sometimes not log onto online class but did log onto the remote intervention time, which the team interpreted as related to the deep connection and intimate learning environment that intervention creates. Lisette also loved that Literacy Trust was able to put all intervention books online during COVID because it facilitated seamless learning and students could not skip ahead on pages due to excitement, like they could with physical books.
When asked what her favorite part about the program is, Lisette stated she has loved using the Sound Letter boxes with her students. The boxes allow the students to better map out how letters correspond to sounds. Students first need to figure out how many sounds there are in a word and then they draw the same number of boxes. They then write the letters that correspond to the sound for each box. Seeing the letters and sounds is a tremendous help for students who struggle with phonemic awareness.
The ability to sit down with a student in a 1:1 setting has been particularly helpful for one of her students, who has recently met grade level benchmarks. He often becomes frustrated in his sessions with Lisette and feels intimidated by the pages ahead of him in the lesson’s fifth part: reading a new book. The student sometimes shuts down out of frustration but Lisette reminds him that it’s a safe space and that he can get through it. She often uses stickers to reward her students and this helps motivate them. Lisette described how eventually the confidence builds up in every student because of their hard work. They begin to smile, and suddenly have a “glow” to them because they can read without feeling embarrassed!
Lisette has enjoyed seeing how her 30+ students over the years have flourished into confident and fluent readers. She described the joy and pride she has felt in seeing some of her former students, who are now in middle school, as thriving readers. “Seeing them succeed in the long-term really shows why the program is so important to have,” said Lisette as she reflected on her impact throughout the years.
Thank you Lisette and the entire team at PS 20 for your hard work and persistence in helping students learn to read! Your school is lucky to have such an amazing intervention team.