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Visual PQA – 8
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28 thoughts on “Visual PQA – 8”
Congratulations Don!
Good work, Don. Thanks for sharing.
Chill
So inspiring to see what a visual PQA actually looks like. Thank you Don. I might try this with my adult group. One less thing to prepare, love it.
I’m working on one of these PPTs to accompany my “Special Person” Questionnaire, which is probably the same or adapted from Anne Matava’s. It does take time, but once I have it, I’ll be able to milk it 1 student at a time – tons of personalized reps. And the next one I do will be based on getting student feedback on what questions they want asked, like Sabrina did. I’ll share when I finish it.
Finished. For Spanish.
Special Person PPT, Questionnaire, and Quiz (I choose a few at random for the kids to answer at the end)
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6n9VA2R4h9IVElmdUdvRHROcHc&usp=sharing
Nice! Great lay-out, colors, pictures. Visually appealing and engaging. With my little knowledge of Spanish I could understand -almost-everything.
I establish meaning aurally if I have to when using the PPT. I will definitely ask “What does that mean?” more with the first few participants.
This is a MAJOR HIT !!!
I gave 15-20 minutes or so to complete the Questionnaire in English. The PPT has 19 slides. We’ve spent 20-25 minutes per class on this activity and each class we only get through about 6 slides. In other words, it’ll take me about 1 hour per student. But by not finishing all the slides in 1 class, I can spend some time the next class reviewing the previous slides. After each session, I choose a few of the fill-in-the-blank quiz items for the students to answer in their notebooks.
Very high interest! And it encourages lots of student input. And I’ve already seen my rowdy boys engaging more. I have a small whiteboard where I write during the activity any new words that come up and I’m noticing that my kids recall those personalized words!
This is great, Eric! I’ve been doing something really similar and having good success and increased engagement. I will put links here soon for those who teach French.
I got a little carried away, though, and tried adapting my basic slide show to really match the star of the day. It was great for that kid (and for the whole class), but it’s too much for me to keep up with. I can’t make a personal slide show for each kid, even from a template! Whew! I want to find an easy way to personalize it a bit each time, but not the whole show. It did support the personal elements of the story and helped with staying in bounds, but the amount of time I spent on it was crazy!
I did a bit of this last year without the slides. I had mixed success. It was my first year teaching French at all, and I was trying to be 100% CI, so I was trying lots of different things, thanks to this blog. Only got to a few kids with Star of the Day. I did learn some things. This may be an obvious point, but I think it’s important to think about what questions you want to have on your questionnaires, so you get to work with the structures you want. I had just used that shared questionnaire we have, which is great, but I should have adapted it a bit. I also had a little trouble with some of the creative answers being way out of bounds.
Now I am getting my questionnaires set for 6th, 7th, and 8th and the basic slide show to go with each. Between those two things, I think this will be great. I am really excited about it.
I will share all of it as I get it sorted out.
Two questions Eric and Ruth:
-How does the questionnaire (in English) relate to the vPQA? Do you build the vPQA based on the answers from the questionnaire? I noticed that Eric’s questionnaire matches the vPQA slides.
-Do you let students -ask- questions to the superstar? Even in level I (March), do you encourage output to get students used to asking questions?
(The answers may be burried in the -star of the week- threads..sorry)
Yes, I am making the slides match the questionnaires.
I haven’t had students ask questions during the interview. That’s something to think about doing, though, especially after we have done a few. There are definitely kids who will want to do that. Good thought! I was wondering if this would continue to be engaging as we do one after another. That sounds like one good way to change it up a bit.
I have asked if they had questions for the person at the end of the interview, but haven’t had much action there. Asking one of the main questions or adding a follow-up question during the actual interview, might be better. We could even come up with some follow-up question ideas ahead of time to scaffold things a bit.
Thank you, Catherina!
At the beginning of the year I gave them questionnaires that related to what they had done/learned/where they went over the summer as well as more general questions. Because we didn’t do but a couple until recently, the old summer questions, and even some of the more general ones, are out-of-date. So now I have made new questionnaires for the 6th (super simple) and 8th grades (using Sabrina’s format with more in French. Thank you, Sabrina! I love it!). The 7th graders, so far, are being good sports with the originals. They are amused by what they wrote about in September. I will come up with a new 7th grade questionnaire eventually, for next year anyway. I want a nice flow of increasing language going from year to year with this. These three years, 6-8, of French class very part time, are supposed to equal Level 1. For many it will, for some not. It’s okay either way.
…but the amount of time I spent on it was crazy!…
This is why we want to take this slowly. Ruth and I have been testing the waters of how to organize every detail of this program and one of our main goals is to offer a simple strategy that is not too obtuse with a clear step by step plan that relies on the group providing lesson plans that we can share, which will obviate the prep time problem Ruth refers to above. Julie also spends too much time on making those slide shows but we have over 300 people here who can and should, if they want to share lesson plans/slide shows, do their part and make at least one vPQA presentation on whatever two or three targets (or more) they want and we can just open up the file of whatever one we want and click and start teaching.
Don’t worry if vPQA is confusing right now, for those who don’t have time to read every comment here. We are in a building and planning stage for this strategy. So far all we have are snippets of what different people are doing with this new idea of vPQA and questionnaires, Star of the Week, etc. and for many of us right now it a big confusing mess. So if you are in the “I don’t get this” group just kick back and let Ruth and I organize something that you can actually use without having to read every comment. Clarity requires time and that’s why we are not publishing a clear thing on this yet. Thanks for your patience. Every year we seem to come up with something really useful here, but this one could be a really big once every five years deal.
This fact that confusion happens due to the scrolling out nature of the information we share on this PLC is why I am working to put all of the ideas we ever had in the past eight years, all the home run strategies, in one place in my new expanded version of Stepping Stones. I personally need the organization that will come with that book. In no way am I going to allow all the fantastic strategies from years of teaching scroll out into the past here. vPQA is just one more jewel in a beautiful CI crown of strategies that we are now making that will make our jobs seem, as we go along, more and more effortless. Can you imagine? Teaching won’t be such a struggle because we have strategies clearly explained at our fingertips that basically kick ass. I’m lovin’ it. And vPQA kicks major ass. Is it up there with stories? Maybe it is. So let’s take this one slowly.
I created 1 generic PPT for every student. No personal slide shows. I have their questionnaires and can always type up their responses at the end for a reading. But right now, I don’t have any plan to do reading with this. Just aural/oral CI.
This is not vPQA, i.e. it doesn’t target structures.
Part of the reason my 7th and 8th graders are rocking it, is because of the visual and textual support, because they’ve already acquired lots of this language, and because they know how to play the game very well.
I’ve been asking the next question on the slide, then asking a student to translate (I won’t have to do this after a few students), then the student states their slide-prompted response, and I restate for the class (sometimes simultaneously with the class) the 3rd person form. Then, the follow-up questions begin . . .
My kids DO ask the person follow-up questions. I say, “Class, ¿Tiene preguntas?” or I even prompt them, listing some of the question words. Think of that vortex image. We are creating images, adding more and more details, to the question at hand. Sometimes we dig deep, sometimes we move on (I have a student sitting at my computer who advances the slide when I indicate). Sometimes, other students get involved in that image or get paralleled to the Special Person. Just following the energy.
My students do NOT write (no note-taking) during this activity.
Very nice!
Eric wrote:
“Sometimes, other students get involved in that image or get paralleled to the Special Person. Just following the energy.”
Eric, this is what happens in my class, too. It’s more than just question and answer with the special person, so the rest of the class is involved. But so far I am leading this. I want to help them get into the follow-up questions. Your classes sound so good.
And he wrote:
“But right now, I don’t have any plan to do reading with this. Just aural/oral CI.”
I do write up a little story for each student and we read it, but it usually isn’t half as much fun or as effective as the oral/aural interview and discussion. It sometimes feels like just a bit too much, and the kids want to move on to the next “star.” I think I’ll skip the reading together step for a while. We’ll have the stories to use as needed, though, and we’ll have a nice collection by the end of the year.
Eric, you also said how this isn’t vPQA because you aren’t targeting structures. I think this fact kind of confused me when I first started doing this. I was thinking of always needing targets and this was all over the place. But you saying that made me see it this way – all my kids haven’t fully acquired all the structures in the questionnaires, so in a way it is a kind of extensive PQA – lots of structures repeated over a long period of time. Another way to work these common structures.
So now that just made me think of this: making a questionnaire with the Super 13.
I love the way ideas grow. Thank you, everyone, for all the good seeds.
This is truly amazing. Just joining the chat again after quite some time (I’ve been lurking, though 😉 ). Soooo much to do, so little time.
I definitely want to contribute in a constructive way by adding lots of slide shows for German. In case I missed the instructions somewhere in this thread, I assume we’re doing it by creating a Google doc and then sending you, Ben, the link, right?
I haven’t been able to find Sabrina’s slide show (or are you talking about her “Star of the Week” questions?). I am one of those visual learners, so I need to see a few examples before I venture out on my own. Maybe someone can point me in the right direction.
Brigitte, I think we are all waiting for the link. It’s a work in progress. Don posted a link to his star of the week PP, but the vPQA is coming. I too am a visual learner. I need some good links for free pictures too.
Have a good day,
Carol
Thanks so much, Carol! I feel a little out of the loop, not having followed the conversations as closely as I would have liked for a while.
Here are two links that I like for pictures. Maybe you can find something useful there.
http://genevievekote.com/
http://www.flaticon.com/
Greetings from LI,
Brigitte
Thanks, Brigitte. I too have been out of the loop for awhile!
C
Brigitte what the younger DPS teachers have done with this visual PQA has heavily impacted my thoughts about what is possible with stories. Visual PQA can set up stories in a way that the old kind of PQA never could, bringing visual interest, safety and stability where those things cannot be said to have been common in PQA before.
Ruth and I are working on packaging this thing for the group right now and it is proving more difficult than either of us thought it would be. Thanks for your patience on this. I know one thing, that if we are able to get this thing using Power Point slides to target certain structures in different languages up and running we will have an equal cousin to stories in our teaching.
If enough group members contribute, these slide shows will create a lesson plan bank that the angels watching over us in our classrooms will be very happy to see, because it will make their jobs of keeping us safe easier.
So excited, can’t wait to get to work on this 🙂
I’ve got a bunch of slide shows on Google Drive. Is it legal to copy and paste off of Google Images? That’s what I do, but not sure if it’s kosher to share, let alone use them the way I have been doing.
Good question, Angie. One I think about all the time as I merrily copy and paste for educational purposes.
I just found some articles about this. Maybe they are helpful. The first site has a bunch of links that I am going to check out soon.
Article and links to places to get images, videos, etc: http://www.theedublogger.com/2012/02/09/the-educators-guide-to-copyright-fair-use-and-creative-commons/
Connected Classroom: http://theconnectedclassroom.wikispaces.com/Copyright
Like Brigitte and everyone else, I am quite excited about this vPQA.
The general format is, I gather, something like Don Read’s (awesome!) presentation? I have too much Adult ADHD on a good day; my brain craves structure when prepping for class, and I’m thinking of mimicking it but of course need to adapt to other levels and times of the year–
Stories will be integrated into this bigger thing brought through Google Images. Stories are about TPRS. Images are about TCI. Big shift forward for comprehensible input. Stories as a part of PQA. Very interesting.