For too long people have been confused, wrangled, stymied and frustrated by PQA. It’s time to make it optional. We need to hear from more people in the PLC before making a group decision. But yeah it may be time to lose it. It’s artificial and drives teachers nuts. Why not just start class with a story?
Anne Matava has said this about her scripts:
…my favorite scripts arose from a funny idea, something that I knew kids would want to talk about, rather than from a desire to include high-frequency language….
As per a comment I made about four days ago about the role of Susan Gross in helping define and illustrate and make TPRS more accessible to people from around 1997 to 2010 (I will republish it later), we know that PQA was added to storytelling. It was not there at the beginning.
Now, based on a comment by Eric Herman today and based heavily on recent Eric-led animated discussion here about how this work is really about sheltering vocabulary and not sheltering grammar (i.e. focusing more on communication rather than targeting specific structures) it is perhaps time to redact PQA as a requirement of the Three Steps.
Yes, it’s a wonderful idea and can be quite fun with the right structures but its reign of terror over too many teachers who are new to TPRS must now be brought to a close.
(The above statements in my mind do not refer to vPQA or the process of just talking to the kids with Power Point presentations. That kind of comprehensible input instruction is important to keep as a separate distinct option to doing stories. I’m talking about dropping PQA as a first step in the story telling process. It should be optional at best.)