Academic biography

Prior to her move to initial teacher education, Sinéad taught for eleven years in St. Vincent’s Infant Boys’ school in North William Street. Here, Sinéad spent 6 years in the mainstream classroom, before moving into the role of SET working with children with a wide range of diverse and specific learning needs.  It was this work that ignited Sinéad’s interest in educational disadvantage, motor development, playful learning and early intervention. Sinéad completed her Masters in Educational Disadvantage in 2011 in Dublin City University, and most recently, her Doctoral research in 2021. Her research interests include infant motor development, educational disadvantage and emergent handwriting development.

Sinéad is the author of Move Write - A Whole-body Sensorimotor Approach to Handwriting (2023). The Move Write programme is a sensorimotor approach to developing the emergent handwriting skills of infant children that emerged from Sinéad's doctoral thesis. The programme aims to develop key gross motor, fine motor and visual perceptual skills that are foundational in developing proficient handwriting skills. Providing learners with rich, sensory experiences is central to the programme, which adopts a playful approach blended with explicit instruction.

Sinéad enjoys writing a personal, educational blog which reflects her own learning across contexts.