Relationships are what keep us living and learning in community with each other. I believe that it is these relationships and community that enable us to continue providing the families of children who are deaf or hard of hearing with quality services. In order to keep providing high-quality services from highly qualified providers, we need to keep abreast of what is best practice in our respective fields. My goal here is to build a community based on evidence-based practice and help bridge the gap between research and practice. I am actively engaged in professional development as a learner and through creating and providing professional development opportunities at a school district, state, national, and international level. I want to encourage all professionals to focus on data driven decisions that are free of bias. Through my work in strengths-based coaching and mentoring, I believe that I am uniquely positioned to help service providers who work with children who are deaf and hard of hearing make progress towards their personal and professional goals. My hope is that we can continue to strengthen and expand our community through research, evidence based practice, and collaboration.

I am a Listening and Spoken Language Specialist, Certified Auditory Verbal Educator. I hold both a bachelors and a masters degree in Education of the Deaf from Vanderbilt University. I previously worked as a Teacher of the Deaf in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and in Houston, Texas. I am co-author of Auditory Verbal Strategies to Build Listening and Spoken Language Skills, which can be downloaded for free from this site. My research interests are in increasing parent education and participation in my community. I am working to eliminate the extremes of bias in the field of deaf education with the hopes of more practitioners and parents finding a comfortable place, radically in the middle.

All photos on this blog belong to Elizabeth Gaffney or will be credited accordingly.