An excellent question, a repost from a year ago, about the pacing of PQA and kids’ ages from Jason Bond over in Scotland:
Hey Ben:
I have a wee question that maybe you and the PLC could shed some light on:
I’ve noticed that when I do PQA with my S1s (12-13 years old), it only goes so far before we run out of time. For example, we were circling things the kids did on holiday and established:
1. Brooke got a dragon for Christmas
2. It was rainbow colored.
3. It had 0 wings.
In between points 2 & 3, we had a brain break because the class was getting extra antsy. It was last period on a Friday so I don’t blame them but I was hoping to spin at least one more scene with another kid before the bell rang.
Is this natural in a middle school class – to get that few details in a 50 minute class? I ask because my S3s (equivalent of 9th graders) and I get into some pretty detailed stories whenever we extend PQA. However, this could be due to maturity and 5 classes a week.
I think that perhaps I’m circling each point into the ground, causing disengagement and the blurting that fired up halfway through the class. Thinking back, I also wasn’t using eye contact as much as I should’ve been.
Any insights are most appreciated!
Thanks very much,
Jason
My response:
This is an art. Each of us has our own teaching personality and our own way of engaging our kids. We also have kids of different ages who have all sorts of different backgrounds. Thus, what one of us might consider fast another would call slow. So how do we mix all those factors into some common sense advice about pacing our questions?
One thing is that, although we should speak really slowly, always checking for understanding and engaging all of the kids, without exception (because one bad apple spoils the whole box), we should at the same time move the information along. We have to speak slowly but move the information along. That is what you didn’t do in that one class about the dragon and I think your observation that you weren’t in eye contact with the kids plays into that and was a good observation.
I’m also reminded of the discussion yesterday here about how a chair can get kids focused so we need to mention that as a very strong answer to your question Jason:
https://benslavic.com/blog/jody-noble-the-special-chairla-silla-especial/
We also can bring in parallel information. We can ask questions to Jenny, who can’t sit still, about HER dragon. Is it also rainbow colored? How many wings does it have? Often in PQA, when things get too boring and tight, like we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, we just compare what we have to what some other kid has.
Another thing we can do as we move things along – this refers to stories – is to bring in a new character or event, as Blaine always told us to do when stories stall out.
The question is if kids this young can start stories. We would need the combined expertise of this group to come up with a really good answer to that question.
If you had a good script – there are many good examples in the Story Scripts category on this page and Jim and Anne have written some killer scripts – and you just started in, with no intention of finishing the story by the end of the class but instead just sitting on that first location for up to two class periods if necessary, you would probably see some benefits in the form of more engagement by the kids, but the age of the kids is a factor, as I mentioned above.
The S3 kids I assume are around 14 years old, right? And the S1s are as you said are 12 and 13. Now these age differences must be looked at. In my own experience of teaching kids of those ages, when I taught in a middle school, I found that for me a 12 year old is a FAR different creature from a 14 year old. A kid who is a freshman who is almost 14 or has just turned 14 (not 15, those hellish second year sophomores) is in my view the best age for stories. So the S3s you have are in my opinion almost a perfect age for stories and you say you have success with them. And so with those S3s you should definitely be doing stories from good scripts right now. You will start seeing some of those bemused smiles in their faces with those kids. I touched on the idea of bemused smiles as indicators that you are doing it right in an article here last week. That is what you want – totally focused faces that are slightly wigged out about the bizarre image that is being unwrapped right in front of their eyes. You will see those kids who are almost 14 or just turned 14 sitting there wrapping their minds around the bizarre images created with the help of the story script.
But what about those S1s? That is the problem here. Can they do stories? I don’t think so. I never really got stories going with 12 year old kids. That is exactly why I invented CWB and OWI and the WCTA and all that stuff – because at the beginning of the year with my brand new seventh graders (12 and just turned 13) I found that they didn’t have the maturity – and you suggested that above yourself Jason – to do stories. All they could do was the beginning of the year stuff. If I didn’t have CWB, etc. I honestly may have run screaming from the room – sprinting down the hallway with all my might – away from some of those snarkorific 12 year olds. And, by the way, I relied heaviest with the 12 year olds on a huge word wall and, since those kids seemed to really like to just look at the wall and translate the words, we did a lot of that. I think 12 year olds are really into lists. And then I would make up combinations of the words in the word wall (Word Chunk Team Game) and we spent a lot of time doing that. Certainly not stories.
So what about your S1s? I’m sure that we both agree that they need more complex images that are better images than those you got with the dragon with no wings. But what?
I would like to hear what others say because I am very interested in the challenges of teaching young 12 year olds, having never done it. I understand from things Catharina and Eric and Ruth have said on the Forum that kids younger than 12, and especially under 8, can get laughing and out of control real fast with some of the stuff we do.
There is something that Eric and Catharina said about a 1 or 2 second rule to prevent kids from losing it when something funny happens. Does anyone know about that? What is it and does it work?