There is a saying that goes, “Never too old to learn, never too young to teach”.

Ms Bubble Tea may be one of the youngest members of the English Department, but she had a unique advantage: she has the most experience when it comes to teaching students with dyslexia. She absorbed literacy support strategies, thought hard about how she could apply them to stretch her students’ abilities and implemented her original methods. Thus, she was the natural choice to helm today’s Personal Development session.

She first provided a holistic view of her teaching routine. How do you optimise the limited 8 EL periods that are given to you? Ms Bubble Tea explained her weekly plan. She would teach how to spell unfamiliar words, learn the meanings in context & apply them in context with a comprehension cloze. For the 3rd & 4th periods, she would conduct spelling before moving on to preview a comprehension passage with her class. She modelled the act of asking questions for the first 2 paragraphs. She would gradually release responsibility such that her students took more ownership in asking questions. The last 2 periods would see her coaching her students how to answer questions.

After piquing our curiosity, she launched into a lesson demo. The conventional way of teaching requires teachers to do 4 things when it comes to teaching comprehension: Thinking Aloud, Making Connections, Summarising & Forming Opinions. Ms Bubble Tea would zero in and focus on Thinking Aloud.

She was guided by the belief that our students are weak and passive readers, which hinders their comprehension of a given text. Many of them can sound out every word but fail to understand the author’s main ideas. So, she felt it was imperative to teach her students how to ask questions so that they would naturally engage proactively with the text.

Some pictures of her in action:

No question is a stupid question, so even when students utter something like “Who am I?”, she affirmed them because this demonstrated their thinking. She typically covers the easier Who-When-When-What questions with her class before advancing to the more challenging How-Why questions. For her high-progress classes, she would be mindful of the need to stretch them. So, she would get them to infer the character’s feelings for every paragraph.

To round up this portion, she showed us how to answer comprehension questions by not just circling the question word, but also writing down what it suggests in the form of an answer.

The last part of her PD involved her sharing how she breaks down a word into its constituent syllables and gets students to fill in the vowel sounds. As you can infer from the image below, weaker students would get more scaffolding. Stronger students would be tasked to spell more of a particular word.

I’m humbled by how Ms Bubble Tea solidified her courage and conviction to teach after many years of specialising in teaching students with dyslexia. She reminds me of the great song, Free, by Baz Luhrmann: The most interesting people I know Didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't. Maybe it’s time for me to stop fooling around & start settling down on one obsession. xP