How do we get from a fact that we learn about a kid during PQA into a full blown story? This will be discussed in greater detail here in a series of connected articles over the next few days. We can’t wait until the summer (some of us can’t get to a workshop.) We have to use the classes we have now to practicing doing PQA so that we can start next year with more confidence. If we are having a tough late winter/early spring right now and things feel disorganized, which is normal in schools, we can use the time and the students we have now as captive audiences to practice doing PQA:
1. First, find out some fact about a student, from just hanging out with them asking questions at the start of class, or maybe from the Circling with Balls card and the Questionnaires from the beginning of the year (the Questionnaires are neatly fitted on the back of the cards). Maybe we learn that our student Sammi has three cats at home.
2. When we feel the boredom of that (Chris’ question of about a month ago), we (boldly for some of us who are new to this) move from fact to imagination, suggesting perhaps that there is a cat in the room. We may not know anything about it, its name and other details, but the kids will provide us with that information. (We extend the PQA.)
3. When we can’t stand any more details, we then ask where, guiding the location to be local and personalized to the kids in the room, to their haunts around town. (We further extended the PQA.)
4. Next, we (boldly for some of us who are new to this) bring a new character or event into the scene. (We extend the PQA further.) At this point we may want to use dialogue to develop character and look for a possible problem, to be intoduced later.
5. The we get an actor up. (We start a story.) Maybe we want to see what kind of dialogue happens. During this time, we can be thinking of a problem. We don’t have to do the dialogue. We don’t have to force a story. We can bail out of this at any time by asking for a nice round of applause for any actors who may have gotten up and then we have a whole room full of other options to PQA.
6. If, when the actor has stood up, we still feel some energy in the comprehensible input (which is the real purpose of all of this) we can create a problem. It doesn’t have to be complex. Maybe the new character doesn’t like the cat, or, using dialogue, it says something loving (middle school kids go for this one) or hateful (high school kids eat this up) and the story now has some wings. (We further develop the story.)