Merve Meral İçilensu

I began my career as an English language teacher. Over the years the same question kept returning in the classroom: I was teaching the same lesson in the same way, yet children were taking it in along very different routes. One learner grasps it on the first attempt; another stays stuck in the same place for months. Seeing that this was not a matter of talent, but had a developmental basis, is what drew me towards child development.

Today I work between two fields. On one side is the classroom — English lessons at KALEV Schools, with age groups from early childhood through adolescence. On the other is my work as a child development specialist: developmental monitoring, attention and perception assessments, school adjustment difficulties, and meetings with parents. The two feed each other. To understand why a child resists writing, you need to see both the classroom and the developmental picture.

In 2026 I completed both of my master’s degrees. My thesis at Okan University, in Child Development and Education, examined the relationship between the executive functions of 60–72-month-old children and those of their mothers: how skills such as planning, inhibitory control and working memory take shape in a child, and how they echo the patterns at home. In my neuroscience work at Üsküdar University I focused on the neuroanatomical and neurocognitive foundations of those same skills.

Alongside the classroom I have also worked in school leadership: three years as vice principal of the primary school at Artı Sonsuz College, and as its English language coordinator. I completed my child development placement at Ümraniye Training and Research Hospital. Seeing a child not only in the classroom but with their family and in a clinical setting showed me how many different vantage points the same behaviour can be read from.

On this site I write about the subjects I meet in the classroom and the consultation room. My aim is not to prescribe, but to describe the developmental ground beneath a behaviour, in language parents and teachers can follow.