I have made a synopsis of the steps Julie uses to design her vPQA slide shows. I republish it (it first appeared here in March) because some of us will be working with it next week and Julie will be there to demo it. I want to highlight the parts in red below, and discuss them next week (in our war rooms) so that when we go back into our classrooms in the fall we have an exact clear idea of how to do this work. What Julie does builds purposefully through certain steps and is in effect a taxonomy. Therefore it goes narrow and deep for the kids and is not flat and wide PQA based on generalized slides that lack planned repetitive instruction. We must avoid crappy slide shows because they just confuse the kids. My wish is that the entire data base we create on Haiku Deck – every deck we make all year – would follow this generalized plan. (There are articles on how to do that in the vPQA and HD categories here, on the Primers hard link above and in the Big CI Book). Again, the steps in red are what make vPQA unique and what we want to keep in our minds as we study how vPQA works next week at iFLT so that we can maximize the returns we get on this powerful new strategy:
Visual PQA (vPQA) Classroom Step by Step Process
- Choose 3 structures from a district Scope and Sequence word list, or from a novel or authentic reading.
- Create a PowerPoint vPQA presentation following the general sequence described below or on p. 199.
- Slide 1: Do Now questions (one question on time/weather; three random questions)
- Slide 2: Presentation Slide. This presents the first target structure with an image (e.g.Waldo carrying books). On this initial slide provide a visual and the L1 meaning of the target structure(s). This is the only slide that we have English on, because if we sequence well and gradually shelter and scaffold the subsequent slides, there shouldn’t be a need for English.
- At this point establish the meaning and the gesture.
- Continue on with a few more slides like this and maybe even show the words using the infinitive, past tense or a different form of the present tense so the students see it in other ways.
- Image and Sentence Caption Slide: This presents the first structure with an image and a sentence caption: “The boy is carrying an elephant on his shoulders.” Read the sentence slowly aloud and use the pointer to emphasize the different words. It is crucial to find an appropriate and effective visual to accompany the sentence so it serves as an aid in understanding the text if there are any comprehension difficulties.
- Ask for a volunteer to translate the sentence. Julie Soldner adds: “If the translation is not perfectly translated, ask for another volunteer or just randomly call on someone to try again. The reason why I do not put the English up there is really two-fold. First, they can become lazy and just read the English (because why not? It is the easy route…and then they don’t push themselves to try and understand it)…also I like to just keep the slides simple and clean-Spanish text and visual. It keeps things uniform. But the goal is always for them to be entirely in the target language so when I eventually get to the question slide, they can read the options and then raise their hands to keep the discussion going. I may also have the support of sentence stems on the slide so they answer in complete sentences and use the new vocabulary structure.”
- Question Slide with Response Options. This slide asks a question and provides possible responses. Ex: “What do you carry in your backpack?” will offer on the same slide a list of options like: books, notebooks, pens, pencils, food, erasers, money, candy, cell phone. You can provide a sentence frame at this point as well to help them get the verb form right when they answer.
- Presentation and discussion of more slides.
- Repeat the entire above process with the second target structure (or third if there is one).
- Do the Debate.
- With the PQA now over, ask a story based on the structures. (Step 2 of TPRS)
- Read the story using Reading Option A. (Step 3 of TPRS)
- Give the quiz.
The background on vPQA, for those who are just coming into this thread, is that a number of rock star young CI teachers trained by Diana Noonan in Denver Public Schools had a natural aversion to stories and decided to get their feet wet in CI by teaching, at least for a few years until they felt more comfortable with stories, using Power Point slides. That’s what they have done.
Now, whenever I observe in DPS classrooms, I see this – great young teachers using slides and going more slowly with stories, for now. I highly recommend moving slowly into stories in this way, therefore, to anyone who has experienced the weirdness of stories and would like to go into using them more slowly. After all, this is PQA Step 1 TPRS work that leads to doing Step 2 TPRS stories anyway!
If you want to read the entire 30 pp. document on vPQA, and I highly recommend you do that and even practice using it this spring in your classrooms (because you won’t get another chance to practice this highly effective strategy for next year once this school year is over) just click on the first Primer link above on the hard links bar.
(If like me you are lazy, I am collecting a data base of vPQA slide shows from some of the generous and talented teachers here in our group who are already off and running with vPQA. I am not allowing those shows to be published, however, until we stay within copyright infringement regulations. More on that later.)