I got this great question on vPQA from Keri Colwell, whose name is now Biron as Colwell was her maiden name. This question needed to be asked:
….the vPQA seems wonderful. However, does it take away from the spontaneity of it all? I tried it once and it seemed to be a bit restricted since the kids didn’t really have the freedom to create a story from it. I’m not talking about a full TPRS story but almost every single time we do PQA as a class, it becomes a story and the kids really enjoy it. In fact, I like PQA a little better than the TPRS stories myself. The answers they give sometimes are so funny that we all become hysterical laughing. It’s great to do this in the target language! Maybe this is because I don’t really have a script in front of me so the kids really take it wherever they want…of course, with my approval. I always PQA a structure or two from a song every couple weeks, I PQA three structures from every chapter of a novel we are reading, and, of course I PQA structures that precede a story . I do PQA all the time and I love it! Well, I attempted vPQA once and it didn’t go very well in the sense that it was much more boring than usual. The kids were certainly understanding and, yes, engaged but not nearly to the level they are without the slides. In my first class that day I had about 9 or 10 slides and figured I should get through them. That was a mistake. The following class I spent a little over an hour on only two slides! We went narrow and deep on two expressions with pics and, again, it just naturally became a story and I had kids in front of the room acting it out…it went much better that time but I don’t think I was really doing vPQA. It was just want we normally do…the only difference was I had a picture to represent the structure. What is your opinion? Also, I could have very well done the vPQA all wrong. I have to look at it a little closer still….
Now, the answer to this question is right here in what Keri said:
… the following class I spent a little over an hour on only two slides! We went narrow and deep on two expressions with pics and, again, it just naturally became a story and I had kids in front of the room acting it out…
So the thing about vPQA and ALL of our CI instruction is that we want to spark imaginative discussion in the form of stories or in any form. As long as we stay in bounds, we go where the class goes. I am so happy to say this, and very grateful to Keri for bringing this clarification, because “following energy” is not a very popular term in the mouth of an educator, but it is what brings the mojo so we need to learn how to do it. Keri clearly does. Not everyone does, and so we have vPQA to keep us on the straight and narrow. No blame. Each of us does what we do in our CI classrooms. The fact is that I think I made vPQA out in recent months here on the blog to sound as if it always morphs into hilarity and that is not the case. So I very much appreciate Keri bringing this up, so that I can make clear that what she did by going with the two slides only that day, as long as she stayed on the original vPQA targets, is the best thing to do in vPQA.
On the one hand, vPQA, because of the images, limits the creativity of a CI class. On the other hand, it provides necessary structure to teachers who are not that comfortable with “just following the energy” and all that other hippy stuff I describe in what is my own opinion of what PQA should be.
So yes, vPQA, because of the images, limits the discussion. And yes, free form PQA gives some people the willies. So what to do?
Clearly, it just depends on our personalities. For some of us, the images we base our questioning on in vPQA keep us secure within the parameters of the targets, but, as in Keri’s situation, can limit the creative. That is fine. We do what is most comfortable for us. For Keri, trying to stay on ten slides made the class flat. This will be true of many such classes, where we blindly go from slide to slide without inviting frivolity and asking for cute answers from our students. But when Keri treated it like a developing story, and ran with what she got and in that vPQA class only got to two slides, then the creativity and fun was back in her classroom. This is what I recommend. If your personality is such that you feel comfortable doing that, do it. If not, if you need some more time with this kind of teaching, wait. It’s all up to you. Every decision about how to get reps on target structures is up to you. But know that if you are willing to take a risk, and, as I said in a recent post here yesterday (Monday), go overboard in making the class about them. But only do what is comfortable for you. Why? Because there is no right way to do this, and there is no end to how many layers of the onion you will go through in your career. This kind of instruction means that your career will take the form of a constant unfolding into deeper and deeper layers of the onion. You can’t compare what you do with others in this work.
So my response to Keri has two parts: a) do what feels best and most comfortable to you and b) understand that CI is meant to be about finding cute things to talk about while staying in bounds.
(Note also that Keri suggested she may have been doing vPQA wrong. Are we making ourselves understood? That is the only right or wrong in this work.)