Our Team

I first became aware that speech-language pathologists existed when I was 14 years old. One of my younger brothers had always stuttered but it became much more severe after our father passed away. One day, my brother came home and was very upset because the kids had started teasing him at school. I was very concerned for him so I spoke to one of my teachers and she suggested that we talk to our family doctor. Unfortunately, he was of no help to us. He remarked that as my brother “got over” my dad’s death, the stuttering would go away as well. I was infuriated with him for suggesting that we would eventually “get over” something so heartbreaking and life altering that I became determined to seek help for my brother on my own. I started calling CLSCs and hospitals, speaking to so many different people until finally someone put me in touch with the Speech Pathology Department at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. I brought my brother to his first summer group session there and I remember meeting the speech-language pathologist that helped change his life. To this day, he does such an amazing job controlling his dysfluencies that very few people know that he stutters. I remember thinking during one of the sessions that when I grew up, I wanted to do something that would have that kind of positive, life altering effect on people.

Fast forward to 1998 when I received my graduate degree in speech-language pathology from McGill University! At the end of my schooling, I was fortunate enough to have an internship at the Montreal Fluency Centre where I was provided with clinical mentoring, amazing support and so many different opportunities to learn as a clinician. After my internship, I was asked to stay on as a staff member and that was the beginning of the fulfillment of a promise that I made to myself when I was just 14 years old. Over the past twenty years, I have had the privilege of helping and changing the lives of hundreds of kids and their families. After a few years of general practice evaluating and treating many different types of speech and language difficulties, I discovered that helping children learn how to read and then providing them with strategies to understand what they were reading was what I was the most effective at and what I found the most rewarding. I will never forget the first time that a child looked up at me after he read several words successfully by applying the phonics rule that I showed him. He asked me why no one had ever taught him that before and were there any other rules that I could show him! I remember that his Mom cried and that I teared up as well, while the child just laughed with joy at his success and kept reading the words on the list. What an uplifting and rewarding moment that was!

Over the past twenty years, I worked hard at developing a specialty treating and evaluating children with language based learning disorders; however, I still felt like something was missing. Fortunately, having an amazing psychologist on staff allowed me to case conference different clients with her and eventually we realized that children improved the most academically when we combined our expertise into the treatment process. Enthused by the success of our collaboration for the clients we saw in sessions individually, we started brainstorming ways that we could collaborate to change the lives of more children at once. Out of that brainstorm emerged two very successful programs for pre-teens and teens. The first project is the intensive summer group program targeting reading comprehension and written language skills. This is a unique program run by both a speech-language pathologist (myself) and a psychologist (Dr. Marlene Desjardins) targeting middle school children for whom services are quite scarce. The children really enjoy the program and see the benefit of it, so much so that they ask to return year after year! The second project for which I am a co-coordinator is the Taylor Adolescent Program for Middle School children, an after school strategic tutoring program for children with different types of learning difficulties, including literacy and language based learning disorders. This program has allowed me to be instrumental in helping children develop strategies to better succeed academically and socially. In addition to these two programs, this year I was invited into a grade 5 classroom to model for the teachers and students different strategies that help improve reading comprehension. During this process, I realized that an effective way to reach and change the lives or more children is through their teachers. Educating teachers in different effective methods will ensure that the needs of a larger group of kids gets met year after year. Although thrilled to be invited into a local school, I was also excited to be part of a project this year that provides services to children within a school setting via teleconference to remote areas of Quebec, where speech and language therapy services are not easily accessed. The success of this program is quite promising, opening up opportunities to provide services to children and families in so many different communities all over the world!

In looking to the future, I am hoping to continue to strengthen my expertise, and to expand the different programs that I have the privilege of being a part of into more schools, more underprivileged and remote communities so that I can continue to affect and change lives in a positive way.