LONGWOOD, Fla. — A+ Teacher Lindsay Tabora just gets it. She loves showing her students different strategies to overcome learning challenges because she knows first-hand what they are facing.

What You Need To Know

  • Lindsay Tabora teaches at Pace Brantley Preparatory School 

  • She says she had severe ADHD and a lot of struggles in school as a child

  • Tabora loves working with neuro-diverse learners because she knows how to help them  

  • Here’s how you can nominate an A+ Teacher

When Tabora isn’t busy in the classroom teaching students, she is busy at her keyboard, entering their grades. She enjoys taking a quick break to show off her Mexican folk-art collection.

“It brings color into the classroom,” she said. “I love color.”

Tabora’s sunny disposition shines bright at Pace Brantley Preparatory School in Longwood, where she teaches middle schoolers.

“I like to have a little bit of pieces of me around the classroom, because one, I spend a lot of time here, and two, I like to show my kids who I am,” she said. “Because I want them to connect with me.”

She says that is important at the private school where she teaches. It caters to students with individualized learning needs.

“So, all of our students are neuro-diverse in some way,” she said. “They may be on the autism spectrum. They may have other learning differences like ADHD, or dyslexia, dyscalculia, which is kind of like dyslexia for math, and that’s my area.”

Tabora can relate to the challenges that many of her student’s face.

“I had a lot of struggles in school when I was a kid,” she said. “I had pretty significant severe ADHD. I was a bit of a wild child. I gave my teachers a bit of a run for their money.”

“They didn’t always understand what I was going through, and why I was having struggles to concentrate and to sit still. So, now I love working with this group of neuro-diverse learners, because everyone has a special need that I can help them with.”

She sums it up in one word when it comes to the atmosphere she likes to create in the classroom.

“Is the flexibility,” she said. “You can’t just be one way with kids. You have to find all the different ways that they learn. Meet them where they’re at.”

“Everything we do here is about helping them learn with what they know how to do and then showing them the tools and the strategies they can use to get better and feel confident in learning,” Tabora added.

She says confidence is key.

“It’s easy to very quickly start to believe that you are not smart, or you cannot learn,” she said. “So, what we do here is open learning and different avenues and teach different strategies so that the students start to realize, ‘Oh, I’m absolutely capable of learning and retaining this information. I just have to do it differently than I was taught before.’ I get where they’re coming from more than most because my background is very similar.”