ABOUT US

Donita Grissom, Ph. D., owner of Elanco.PD, has dedicated Elanco.PD’s overall goal to find personalized solutions to the needs of all English Language Learners. She discovered that by directly working with teachers, creating resources, coaching and follow-up; the teachers are able to meet the proficiency needs of their English learners with confidence and without spending an enormous amount of extra time.   

Dr. Grissom has years of experience teaching, graduate school, and teacher training all over the world. Her experiences have been in K-12 classrooms, high school teaching Language Arts through ESOL, adult ESOL classes, district based ESOL Curriculum Specialist, and graduate and undergraduate English as a Second Language methods and culture courses at UCF.  She is an English Language Specialist for the U.S. State Department conducting professional development workshops for various countries.   Dr. Grissom has over 24 years of experience in ESL/EFL/ESOL teaching, research, curriculum design, teacher training, professional educational consulting, and coaching. She specializes in training pre-service and in-service teachers methods of teaching English to speakers of other languages nationally and internationally. 

Dr. Grissom was chosen by the U.S. State Department to be the keynote speaker of the TEA Alumni Conference in Islamabad, Pakistan in 2019; Pakistan TESOL in 2020; Vietnam TESOL in 2021; and, Vietnam in August, 2022.  Dr. Grissom focuses on Hope Theory and SEL in her workshops, keynotes and research.  Hope theory and SEL focuses on the goals, strategies, motivation and agency thinking strategies that will help any teacher, parent or student achieve more success, attain more goals and realize overall personal happiness in life.

Dr. Grissom graduated from Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO) with a B.S. in Elementary Education and a specialization in Early Childhood. She obtained her Master’s Degree in Instruction and Curriculum, with an emphasis in teacher training in the field of ESOL at the University of Florida (UF). Thereafter, Dr. Grissom received her Ph.D. in TESOL from the University of Central Florida (UCF).  

Leslie Mendez, Ed.D., Professional Consultant,  has been advocating and enhancing the education of English learners for the past 20 years!  Dr. Mendez has spent her professional career teaching, training, coaching, and leading students and educators around the nation; as well as, consulting/training on a global scale. Her experiences have been in a mixture of educational settings ranging from primary/secondary education, post-secondary/universities, and in various industrial settings (including medical and healthcare).

She was chosen to present at many national and international conferences over the last 6 years. 

She graduated from the University of Central Florida (UCF) with a B.S. in Elementary Education and a specialization in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). She received a Master’s Degree in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Phoenix. After completing all of the coursework for a second Masters Degree in Educational Leadership, she successfully completed her Doctorate of Education (Ed.D.) in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialty track in TESOL at UCF.