This is the final article on Spinning PQA.
When we give up any idea of establishing meaning, defining words, telling a story that resembles a script, or even of teaching, then we have arrived at the threshold of a new world, at a new experience in teaching. Those things, the three steps, are necessary, but they aren’t all there is.
We can give up the need to become clever TPRSers who worry, fret and analyze about how PQA differs from a story – this describes me for the past ten years. We can give up finding a million ways to do a reading class, or to use computers in the service of comprehensible input.
We can float above all that in our classes. We can become just people talking to other people in a spirit of shared meaning and a desire to communicate and uplift each other’s experience of life by means of the vivid experience of imagining things together. This is where I see the method going.
This kind of TPRS brings a new day of lighthearted discussion, laughter at the expense of no one, language flowing like water in directions that reflect the make up of personalities in the group, language that is free to naturally go in the direction created in each moment of circling during PQA.
I am not so naive that this kind of classroom experience can be reached without first basing one’s work in the classroom on all the established premises of TPRS. Indeed, the steps of TPRS are just that – stepping stones to a higher experience of teaching.