I had mentioned that Julie gave another DPS Learning Lab yesterday. It was even better than the first and quite different. She still used the Power Point slides which Ruth labeled Visual PQA and for now at least it looks like that term will stick.
In this kind of Visual PQA Julie spends lots of time just discussing slides with her kids. She seems to have made a conscious decision to react with interest to what she learns from her students. Her class isn’t about some teacher asking for the right answer, perched above the students. Rather, Julie participates in the conversations, smiling and reacting as one would in a normal conversation among friends.
This aspect of what Julie does goes beyond mere teaching to actually being a participant in a wonderful conversation! Of course, I would guess that one result of behaving in this way with her kids would in fact be the huge amounts of early unforced output she gets from her kids. They speak so much because they feel as if she is asking them questions in order to find out what they think, not because she is a teacher in some strange game called School.