Founder, Lead Teacher
A native Spanish speaker, Teresa’s teaching journey has spanned across North America, including her home country of Mexico, USA and Canada. In the past two decades, her teaching experiences led her to develop an innovative framework for Spanish language learning around two tenets: The Science Behind and The Art of Teaching Spanish.
Teresa began her teaching career with Mexico’s Ministry of Public Education, right after graduating from college. She joined the Early Childhood Development task force, where she continued to evolve her natural gift of connecting with children. Her early professional interests included the use of music as a tool for brain development and grade school readiness; this specialty area included language acquisition and social-emotional skills. From here on, she became passionate about engaging students’ minds by adapting delivery methods to students’ varied ways of learning, recognizing that teachers remain the single most important school factor in a child’s learning achievement. This was the beginning of what later became a pillar of Bilingual Kids Seattle’s value proposition: The Art of Teaching Spanish.
In the USA, Teresa has been teaching Spanish to grade school children for more than a decade. During this time, she led a global team of bilingualism practitioners, educators, pedagogical experts, Spanish language and literature scholars, artists and musicians, to set the framework for the second pillar of her bilingual education enterprise: The Science Behind Teaching Spanish. Through the years, they have evaluated, licensed or designed, and implemented a variety of curricula and support materials, developing a keen eye for which instructional techniques work best in different scenarios and in particular in the US context, creating fully engaging learning experiences. This academic rigor, paired with the ability to make the classroom magic happen! is what Teresa’s vision for Bilingual Kids Seattle is all about.
As a mother, she has witnessed first-hand the joys of raising bilingual and bicultural children across all stages, from preschool to high-school. Living for a few years in countries that have fully embraced bilingualism (e.g. Canada, Switzerland), allowed Teresa and her team to personally experience what families endure to provide a bilingual education for a language not spoken at home, while fully embracing its tremendously positive effects. As a foreign language learner herself, Teresa has embedded in her practice a plethora of experiences that come only with life for the benefit of her students, their families and our own teachers. With the ever-growing importance of Spanish in the USA, Teresa took upon herself to share the joy, learnings, personal growth and professional opportunities that bilingualism and biculturalism create.
Join us in this adventure!
