This is the first in a short series of blog posts about PQA:
A rebar (short for reinforcing bar) is a steel bar used in reinforced concrete structures to hold the concrete together. In that way, three rebar rods in a piece of concrete would be like the three structures we use to hold stories together.
Now, we could use cheap rebar – insufficiently repeated structures before moving into the story – or we could use carbon based or even cast iron rebar – heavily repeated, highly personalized structures presented for a long time before the story is begun.
Annemarie Orth in Maine just commented here that she recently made the decision to PQA the whole class on Monday – she has forty minute classes – to guarantee, if you will, the high quality rebar in the story she presents on Tuesday.
I was just over at George Washington High School today and the same thing happened to us. We really studied the relationship between PQA and the story and when to go into the story, how long to stay in the PQA, etc.
It is a very complex question with thousands of possible answers, just like everything else in comprehension based teaching. Is a few minutes enough to work the target structures and, if not, then what do we do about it?
Anyway, like Annemarie, I don’t even think about it anymore. I know that if I repeat each structure like 85 times times (I ask the kids to count them in these Monday PQA sessions), then the story the next day will be, as it were, made of tempered, fired, very strong steel.
I have seen this over and over since I started with this plan in January. Not only are the stories stronger, but also I have definitely noticed that kids absent on Monday are pretty much out of it on Tuesday.
Absent kids, by the way, are not barometers, who are slower processors who try. They are absent kids. So the message to unexcused absent kids is show up for class or get a suck grade on the story quiz.
No formal studies on this, of course. I think that we may have progressed to the point in our Krashen based instruction that we can now avoid wasting time with pointless, almost absurd, data driven bullshit when anyone with half a brain can just walk into a classroom and, by looking at and listening to the kids, see if anything is going on in their noggins.
Let’s take that a little further. I propose that we now base all our research and our evaluation of teachers and what has been learned and all that stuff not on costly data gathering systems, but rather on whether the students and the teacher feel that they are accomplishing good things together, whether they would report that their time in class is well spent, and whether they are happy together or not. It’s not such a far-fetched idea.