Today I observed two middle school classes in a Learning Lab model hosted by Julie Soldner of Merrill Middle School in South Central Denver. (Learning Labs are the trademark strategy of DPS for training teachers new to TPRS and they are far more effective than anything else I personally have ever seen in teacher training – Diana Noonan’s idea).
From Diana and Julie I found out, became deconfused, about the current Scope and Sequence discussion here. Diana is right and I am wrong. More on that later.
From Julie I learned that PQA can include output if combined with images and text. It is a shocking new awareness for me about PQA and a radical departure from what I had previously thought about output in TPRS classes. It is connected to the idea – put forth by our PLC member and Spanish teacher in suburban Denver Suzy Livingston – that literate brains crave self expression in writing and speech and cannot and should not be put off. (Not that we put off speech production in our TPRS classes, but we don’t encourage it that much either and what Julie invented about PQA, what she demonstrated in two class (one 6th and one 7th) today was remarkable, to say the least, to see that a certain design on PQA can produce unbelievable output in kids much earlier than I had hitherto thought possible.
So now I am in the process of getting ready to throw out what I thought PQA used to be in favor of what I saw Julie doing today.
So to repeat:
1. Scope and Sequence plans can be done properly and are essential to new teachers because otherwise they wouldn’t know what to teach. Diana is completely right and I am completely wrong when I suggested here earlier today that Scope and Sequences could possibly be discarded because the TPRS stallion is strongest when not penned in. New teachers need them and that’s the end of it. The only question is what is the optimum S & S design and I and hopefully Diana will address that topic here in the next week or so.
2. A dynamite new strategy has been invented by Julie which has given me in my own world a completely new concept of what PQA can/should be. Those details will follow in the next few weeks.
3. Because of what Julie was doing in her classroom today, I have a brand new conceptualization of TPRS as including lots more speech and writing output (more speech than writing) in the early years. Anyone following recent discussion over the past five years or so here on this PLC knows what a strong statement that really is.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ
[ed. note: Visual PQA was pioneered by Carol Gaab. The term was invented by Ruth Fleishman.]