For years, I've struggled to find the way to do PQA. It wasn't until NTPRS in 2014 that I realized that there are different shades of PQA you can choose from. I talked about PQA with several people and sat in PQA workshops and sessions. These are the shades of PQA I found...
...or maybe I should say: the shades of personalisation. I see personalisation as something we add to every single classroom activity in TPRS, or even as the way we approach teaching in TPRS. PQA is a specific activity that has personalisation as its central objective.
PQA in its 'purest' (original?) form is: asking a student questions about their lives or interests, and to continue to talk about their lives and interest, while you also circle the information from that conversation with the rest of the group, and check whether the rest of the group understands what is being said. It's asking: "What sports do you play? How many times a week? With whom? What position?" You accept the answers the student gives, and may compare them to the answers given by other kids. The "special person" is (in my view) an example of this type of PQA.
For a slightly adapted form of PQA you would embellish their answers, to make it more interesting to the rest of the class. Student A may find it highly interesting that he/she plays basketball in one of the local teams two times a week, whereas the class might be more interested if he/she plays seventeen times a week and is the best player in the best local team. The student probably won't object to any embellishment of his/her life events.
One step further, you could add a fictitious element, like a famous character or a different setting. The basketball player actually plays in the mayor league of China and wins over a famous basketball player. Sometimes, the student will need to be convinced that the facts are indeed as you present them and not as he/she experiences them in real life, and you will need to check if he/she feels comfortable with any changes you make.
Converting PQA into a story would change it from being "PQA" to being "personalisation" in a more general sense. You would make a student be a character in the story, but still as him/herself. In this case, the story is fictitious, the student isn't. The student can verifiy the details you bring into the story, or he/she can bring his/her own details into the story. Since the student is still him/herself, you still need to be cautious about the details.
The last thing that still involves a student and therefor could be considered a shade of personalisation, has nothing to do anymore with the student's own personality. The student is an actor in a story and plays a fictitious character with a name that is not his/her own. The actor is still the one, though, who can verify details when the teacher asks him/her to do so. "Class, Spongebob went to the gym! Is that right, Spongebob? Are you going to the gym?" – and `Spongebob' will have to agree. Or he/she can actually offer details, when asked: "Class, Spongebob went to ...! Well, Spongebob, where did you go?"
So, all in all, personalisation comes in different forms. In the end, with every detail you allow students to add to a story, a OWI or invisible, or even to a single sentence, you are already personalising your teaching. Personalisation is at the core of everything we do in TPRS!
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by Kirstin Plante
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