Special Person is a wonderful way to get to know your students and create community. Since it has been extensively described and blogged about (check out this process document and other free stuff by Bryce Hedstrom), I will focus this post on answering Frequently Asked Questions and sharing my favorite resources for the classroom:
Which questions to ask?
- Mapping of possible questions based on your students proficiency level
- Special Person Interview Posters for early Novice learners (from Amy Roe). Here is my adaptation where I provide options for answers to support early Novices.
- Special Person slide deck for longer interviews with student choice (adapted from Amy Marshall)
Do students take notes during the interview?
- They don’t have to but here is a good low accountability graphic organizer for early Novices. And here is a graphic organizer for Advanced Novices. This can be easily turned into a study guide if you want to formally assess your students, or a souvenir yearbook of our class if you want to give them something special.
What to do after Special Person?
- Write & Discuss (shared writing): let’s co-construct a paragraph about our classmate.
- Exit ticket: tell me one thing you learned about your classmate (use a slide with sentence starters).
- Interview recap game: I create a Kahoot for each student we have interviewed. We play it the next time we meet.
- Mystery Person: after we have interviewed our students, I do a mystery person at the end of each class.
- Bring guests: once we have interviewed everyone in the class, I bring members of our community to class and the students get to interview them using the Special person format. Showing off their skills!
- Assessments: I use our shared writing to create listening/reading assessments.
- Project:
- Early Novices: input-based project (rubric)
- Advanced Novices: Interview and present YOUR special person! (student-choice form, rubric)
- Other fun option: If a student has a pet, I have sometimes done a Pet Picture Talk.
Happy interviews!