Pouncing on things we learn while asking slow circled questions about the cat describes a process that is ever-expanding, because we in our class are looking for something as a group together, which guarantees success in any kind of conversation. To extend the PQA, to create the story, we have to listen to each other.
Compare such expansive circling with having a pre-arranged base of information, in which there is a kind of reduction of facts to get all of the circled information to fit into something.
This is not to say that people new to the method should begin using this kind of free expansive circling. With experience, however, teachers experience a much higher level of communicationwith their classes if they simply avoid talking about anything that has been pre-arranged and if they just give up the idea that they are there to impose some kind of comprehenible input on their kids.
That would be like a jockey tying barbed wire around a horse’s neck and pulling back on it during a race to get the horse to run like the wind.
Stories that are created artistically because the teacher has the courage to let go of their need to control everything are like supernovas, ever expanding, whereas improperly used, scripted stories get pushed kicking and screaming in the opposite direction, as the instructor tries valiantly to fit the kids’ wild imaginations into a box.
This explains why teachers who stick too close to a script experience such frustration with the method. It doesn’t work because you can’t squeeze kids into a story. In fact, you have to do exactly the opposite – squeeze a story out of kids.
Who cares if what we end up with doesn’t follow the original story line? Blaine and Susie have been making this point all along. I remember some years ago I saw Jason Fritze spin a story from a reading and it was just so effortless because he knew how to use information supplied by the class as his primary source and follow it along naturally to wherever it went, and yet not forget the basic structures.
Answers can’t be forced. If they are forced, they are, at best, ineffective. As Pearl Buck wrote in Pavilion of Women:
…all the strength of our listening must gather around the opportune moment of the right answer. And then it will be the right answer….
So what have we learned from the cat example in the three previous blog articles on this topic? We have learned that, in order to be successful with our comprehension based instruction, we should best avoid going in the direction of controlling everything, and go in the direction of the circling while, at the same time, getting massive amounts of repetitions on the target structures. It’s truly a fine balance, and explains why so few people do this kind of teaching.