Now, as soon as you have asked where and brought in another character, this image of the cat is real enough to invite a student to play the role of the cat, and you have a story. Remember that stories begin when an actor stands up and/or there is a problem. If it doesn’t naturally evolve into a story as described, let it go. But if it does, if you invite an actor up and the class accepts, if a kid stands up to be the cat, start circling.
To review how we got from Sammi’s cats to a story about a cat:
1. First, we found out a fact about a student, from just hanging out with them asking questions at the start of class, or maybe from the Circling with Balls card and the Questionnaires from the beginning of the year (the Questionnaires are neatly fitted on the back of the cards). We learned that our student Sammi has three cats at home.
2. We may have circled that for a bit, but when we felt the boredom of the topic (Chris’ question of about a month ago), we (boldly for some of us who are new to this) moved from fact to imagination, telling the class that there is a cat in the room. We didn’t know anything about it, its name and other details, but the kids provided us with that information. (We extended the PQA.)
3. When we couldn’t stand any more details, we then asked where, guiding the location to be local and personalized to the kids in the room, to their haunts around town. (We further extended the PQA.)
4. Next, we (boldly for some of us who are new to this) brought a new character or event into the scene. (We extended the PQA further.) At this point,we may have chosen to use dialogue to introduce another character.
5. Then we got an actor up. (We started a story.) We didn’t have to do the dialogue. We didn’t have to force a story. We knew that we could bail out of this at any time by asking for a nice round of applause for any actors who may have gotten up and then we had a whole room full of other options to PQA.
6. If, when the actor stood up, we still felt some energy in the comprehensible input (which is the real purpose of all of this) we had the choice to create a problem. It would not have had to have been overly complex. Maybe the new character didn’t like the cat, or, using dialogue, it said something loving (middle school kids go for this one) or hateful (high school kids eat this up) and the story now had some wings. (We further developed the story.)
For me, stories based on PQA have to emerge organically from the things that are actually happening in my class at any moment. I do not like the idea of having a previously thought out problem, because it may not be easily connected to what we have imagined so far in class, and what we have learned during PQA.
That is the art of asking a story, to be ready to pounce on the funniest possible scenario that my students and I can think of together. This pouncing always creates better stories than pre-arranged scripts, because in the former there is always a freshness to the discussion, a joyful eye that is always looking out for new possibilities.
Soren Kierkegaard put it this way:
“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.”
The choice to force feed information into the PQA destroys the organic process. In my view, untrammelled PQA is the best.