(14/03/26) Teaching & Learning

Teaching doesn’t always look like lectures or thought-out presentations. Sometimes it looks like people paying attention to the smallest behaviours, habits, or routines you have and learning from them. Today I felt this lesson play out when I needed extra help marking the spelling tests.

I called Rebecca, giving her a red pen, a few of the test papers, and a book to record the marks in. My initial thought was that I would do most of the marking and she would just record the marks. After what seemed like just one minute of me leading the spelling test review and controlling the class, I looked back at Rebecca to see her mini desk busy. Her friends, Joana and Cornelia, were with her, busily arranging papers from the highest to the lowest scores and recounting the marks to make sure they were accurate.

Before I knew it, my pen, the list of words on my phone, and my share of the test papers were with them. I was honestly shocked to see how efficiently they were handling the process, just like I do every Saturday. But what impressed me the most was seeing that they left comments, just like I do as well. To them, telling a classmate they know has more potential to improve seemed like what needed to be done and what “Miss Eline” would do. To me, it was simply a dazzling moment.

In the end, they got Gerald, the assistant head boy, to join their marking-and-recording committee and ended up distributing the papers and correcting mistakes all on their own with little guidance from me. I feel like a proud teacher. As I have said multiple times here, Titanic Beach Readers is really not just about literacy; it is about leadership and collaboration as well.

With that, that’s all I really have to say for this post. Today was, of course, incredible, and I thank you for reading this post to the end! Like this post and leave a comment if you enjoyed it, and scroll down for pictures from today.