This is an updated repost:
Andrew asked a very important question that we all run into at some point. How we react could determine our success with the questioning aspects of CI instruction. Andrew says:
I am struggling with the D part of R & D. I can’t seem to come up with very many questions that don’t come off as too obvious. Sometimes I feel like I am insulting their intelligence and I can see an annoyed look in some kids’ eyes. On the other hand, some kids just go about answering the question so I really don’t know what to do.
An example might be: Pearl was thirsty. She drove to Texas because she wanted a Coke. She went to Kmart. The waiter gave her a drink and she drank it. It wasn’t Coke. It was gasoline.
Is it ok to ask questions like:
Where did she drive? Why did she drive there? Did she go to Walmart? Did the waiter give her food? etc. Hopefully I’m just overthinking this process. I would appreciate anyone’s suggestions.
My reponse: Notice how in the sample questions above the verbs change. The questions meander around and don’t all contain the same target. The key point to make here is that you never ask a question that doesn’t have the target you are teaching in it, and you never don’t asking questions with that single target in it until you feel it has been circled into the ground or until you can see that they have acquired it. That is hard, but once you get that part, Circling and PQA become a lot easier.
Also: Who is Pearl? That is the question you want to ask yourself. If Pearl is just a character in a book, who cares about her? So I would just shift the nature and pace of the questioning to discuss the people right there in your classroom. How? The first thing I would do is ask about Pearl the character in the book only up to the point where they get annoyed. For me that is about three or four questions of the kind you listed above.
But then, if I feel that more reps were necessary before returning to the reading, and they usually are, I shift the discussion away from Pearl to my kids. I like to focus on a kid who is trying to keep me from knowing he isn’t following and won’t respond.
That is to say, I sense which kid needs and can emotionally handle the work, needs to show up today in my class and respond and work and engage in sharing ideas with me in the TL with yes/no answers, and I focus on that kid, making him or her squirm just a bit, by saying something connected to the reading, but about this kid:
“Class, Alan likes Coke. Alan, do you like Coke? Do you like gasoline? Alan, Pearl drove to Texas, right? Do you drive? Do you drive to Texas?”
Just keep hammering away at the kid, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/10/03/annoying-orange/
I don’t like the softy approach to PQA. J’accuse many of us who seem afraid to lock in on a kid and hold them responsible. We often tiptoe around a kid’s frown. I go for the frown. I will lock in on the kid until the frown turns into a smile. No frowns allowed in my classroom! Smiles yes, frowns no.
In PQA discussion or R and D discussion, we personalize it. We keep the target structures from the novel in our minds and hammer away at the kids and leave the text, but never the target structure we are trying to teach. The text is not important, the reps we get in the D part of R and D are what is important*.
Remember, the D part of of R and D is just like PQA where your purpose is to get enough reps on anything that was just read so the next time the kid sees those structures in whatever context, the D part was so strong that they don’t even know why they recognize it, but they do.
*Many of us forget that the nature of our work is very simple in that it is really only about two things – getting reps on target structures and insisting on class choral responses from every kid in the room. What the target structures are doesn’t matter. As academics, many of us fall into the trap that the text is important and needs discussion. It’s not. What is important is the reps on the structures that occur wherever, in PQA, in a story, in a reading, or even on something that pops into our heads at the beginning of class in response to something funny a kid said on her way into class. We are free to write whatever structure we want on the board and work with it the whole period. A bit too random? Not for me. I’m into non-targeted comprehensible input. That’s how I keep my mental health.
Related:
https://benslavic.com/blog/pqa-bis/
https://benslavic.com/blog/psa-2/