November and December are some of the most demanding months of the school year for world language teachers. Between grading, conferences, holidays, and family commitments, many of us simply do not have the capacity to launch a new unit or a complicated project. And yet our students still need rich comprehensible input, meaningful communication, and a reason to stay engaged in class.
The Star Student Interview (Estudiante Estrella) is one of the most effective low-prep routines I know for exactly this moment. With only six to eight questions, a single interview can become several days of comprehensible input, reading, games, and interpersonal speaking, while helping students feel seen and connected to one another.
What Is a Star Student Interview?
A Star Student Interview is a whole-class conversation in the target language where you interview one student in front of the class, using a small set of comprehensible questions supported by visuals and possible answers.
Even though it is an interview, the key is to have the rest of the students participate. How? The class listens, reacts, and joins the conversation. It works at any proficiency level because you control the questions.
If you’re new to this routine, start with my original post, The Star Student Interview: Supporting ALL Our Students Despite Restrictions, and Episode 49 of the podcast, where I break down the basics.
Why the Star Student Interview Builds Engagement
At my school, we’re reading The Disengaged Teen by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop. The authors describe four modes of student engagement:
- Passenger: coasting, doing the minimum to get by.
- Achiever: doing the work and following directions, but often more focused on the grade than the learning. (“Is this for a grade?” “How many sentences do I need?”)
- Resister: pushing back, avoiding work, or withdrawing.
- Explorer: curious, asking questions, interested in what they’re learning.
These are not labels. Students move between these modes depending on their experiences, the class, even the season. The question for us is: how do we create more opportunities for students to become explorers?
The authors point to things like choice, connecting learning to students’ interests, and giving students more ownership as ways to move students into the explorer mode.
And during our faculty meeting, I kept thinking about the Star Student Interview. For years, every time I heard “teach to their interests” or “bring in their experiences,” I thought, oh my gosh, that is so complicated. But this routine already does it. Students feel seen. They contribute something meaningful, no matter their proficiency level. And they become curious about one another.
I’m not saying one strategy will transform every disengaged student. But it creates the conditions for it.
The Low-Prep Plan: One Interview, Six Steps
You only prepare six to eight questions once. Everything else reuses them.
Step 1: The Star Student Interview (10–15 minutes)
- Model it first. If it’s your first time, be the star yourself, or choose a confident student and talk with them before class. You want everyone to want to be the star. That takes trust.
- Celebrate the star. I have a VIP sash with the Colombian flag (and a handmade one from Nicaragua that María, a member of the Academy, gave me). This is their moment.
3. Prepare 6–8 questions with visuals and possible answers. An open-ended question with no options makes students nervous. If they don’t understand the question or how to answer, it isn’t fun or communicative.
4. Level up or down. Novice: Where are you from? Intermediate: Where were you born? Where do you live now? How long have you lived here?
5. Bring the class into every answer. When the star says, “I’m from Philadelphia,” turn to the class: Anybody else from Philadelphia? How long have you lived here?
Here’s the part I can’t fully explain, but you’ll notice it: when an answer really connects with the class, that is your hint to ask more.
Recently, one of my students mentioned he’s an Eagles fan, and suddenly my Spanish 3 students were talking about the Eagles’ season, whether they’ll make the Super Bowl, his family’s roots in the Dominican Republic, and how nobody ever taught him to dance.
None of that was planned. That’s what makes it authentic.
If you need to connect this activity to a curriculum unit, write your questions around that unit’s vocabulary and structures, and be intentional about using them.
Step 2: Write and Discuss (Co-Writing)
Right after the interview, ask students to help you remember what you learned, and write a short text together: This is ___. He was born in ___, but he has lived in ___ for four years…
Just like that, you have a personalized text about someone in your class. If you want the full routine, read How to Use Teacher-Led Collaborative Writing in the World Language Classroom.
This is the text I wrote with my students last week:
Step 3: Independent Reading + Connection Questions
Next class, use that text as a do-now. But first, simplify it. Students will read independently, without my support, so the text needs to be highly comprehensible—a point Adam Giedd made beautifully in How to Get Novice Learners Reading in the Target Language.
Instead of true/false or comprehension questions, try connecting prompts:
- Find something you have in common with our star student.
- Find something that surprised you.
- Find one cool fact you learned.
We’re not just checking comprehension. We’re making connections.
You can stop here. Seriously. You already have a beautiful sequence. Repeat it with another student next week.
I´m planning to do more so if you want more also, this is the plan:
Step 4: The “Me Too” Game (Yo también)
I learned this game from La Maestra Loca, and this is how I play it.
- Project the same interview questions you used for the interview.
- One student stands in front and answers a question (Do you enjoy fall?).
- That student asks classmates the same question. When someone has the same answer, they say “Me too!” or “¡Yo también!”
- That’s the signal for everyone to get up and find a new seat—at least two seats away.
- The last one standing goes to the front.
You can play in a circle or with students in their regular seats. My non-negotiables: no running, no pushing, no moving chairs. We walk fast and find a seat. My students love this game and we get so much input from it.
Step 5: Whiteboard Recall Challenge
Recall is powerful for our students and I want to take advantage of any opportunity to add more recall opportunities for my students. This is what you can do after playing the game “Me too” to do exactly that.
- Get students in groups of 3–4. Each group has a small whiteboard.
- They have three minutes to write, in the target language, everything they remember about classmates: Who likes to sleep? Who plays soccer? Who loves fall?
- When time is up, groups exchange boards, and you review together, giving points for accurate information.
And when you review, don’t waste the opportunity. As AnneMarie Chase and Andrea Caulfield reminded us in Proficiency Through Play, narrating and reviewing a game is input: Who loves fall? Oh my gosh, so many people!
Step 6: Students Interview Each Other
Now students have seen and answered the same questions for at least 2 or 3 days. Now we can take one more step to use the same questions to interview classmates. A few things I’ve learned:
- Students switch to English when the language is new to them. By now they’ve heard these questions many times, but check whether any need more support or you need to simplify the questions.
- Print one question per station. Seven questions = seven stations. With more than 14 students, print two sets; with more than 28, three sets.
- Only one pair per station. Four students at one question becomes a conversation, not an interview.
- Pair students with someone they don’t usually talk to. The goal is to discover something new.
- Students take notes on what they learn (10–15 minutes).
- Give a small card of reaction expressions: ¿Qué? Repite, por favor. ¡Qué interesante!
While students interview each other, walk around. Join conversations and listen to their responses. Not only is this a great formative assessment, but also you can learn so much from your students.
For more structures like this, see How to Build Interpersonal Communication with Purpose in the Target Language.
Bonus: A Class Yearbook
Mónica, a member of the Academy, shared this idea with me: turn your star student texts into a class yearbook.
Use the first text you co-wrote as a model. Each student writes a short paragraph about the classmate they interviewed and adds an illustration that represents that person. It doesn’t need to be a photo. An eagle works perfectly! In November, you can also frame it around gratitude with Doy gracias por…
This step is a great opportunity for students to use what they have been hearing and reading all week to write about a real person in their class. It is also a great opportunity for you to give feedback while they write.
For me, this is the moment for feedback. I walk from student to student, read what they are writing, and give feedback in the moment. I focus on the errors that are getting in the way of communication, not on every single mistake. If I notice the same error in several papers, I stop the class and address it with everyone in one quick moment.
When students finish, collect all the texts. You can create a gratitude bulletin board or put them together in a little class book that students can read again and again. Wouldn’t that be nice? What a beautiful way to celebrate our classes and the people in them!
What You Just Did With 6–8 Questions
- Had a whole-class conversation
- Co-wrote a text
- Read about a classmate
- Played a listening and movement game
- Recalled information in groups
- Interviewed classmates
- Created a yearbook
One routine. Multiple opportunities for comprehension, communication, and connection. And you can change the theme—food, family, hobbies—without changing anything else.
And what about my curriculum? This is my curriculum. We’re communicating, reading, listening, asking and answering questions, writing, and learning about each other. That’s what facilitates acquisition.
You Don’t Have to Do It All
These are stepping stones, not a checklist. Do the interview and the text and stop there. Or add more. It depends on your capacity and your capacity matters as much as your students’. If you’re feeling that “I have to do everything” weight, 7 Intentional Teaching Shifts That Will Lighten Your Load is for you.
Ready-Made Star Student Interviews
If you love this idea but don’t have time to create questions and visuals, my Spanish Star Student Interview School Year Bundle has a set for every month, with 20+ comprehensible questions supported by visuals, sentence starters, and vocabulary. Use them for the interview, the Me Too game, the stations, and the yearbook.
Join the Spanish Teacher Academy Waitlist
And if you want more than resources—if you want a community where you can bring the unit you have to teach and ask, how do I make this comprehensible and communicative?—join the Spanish Teacher Academy waitlist.
Inside the Academy you get monthly support, an entire curriculum, monthly resources like Star Student Interview, Calendar Talk, and Panorama Cultural, and a professional development hub with trainings from amazing educators. Just this week, one teacher had just been assigned AP after 10 years, another was supporting elementary learners, and another needed more vocabulary support—and there was a training ready for each of them.
I’m running a special opportunity for Cyber Monday, and waitlist members are the first to hear about it, plus a little gift. 👉 growingwithproficiency.com/academy
Final Thoughts
The Star Student Interview is proof that engaging, communicative language teaching does not have to be complicated. One small set of questions can give students comprehensible input, reading practice, movement, recall, and real conversation. All built around the people sitting in the room. Especially in the busiest months of the year, choosing a routine like this is not doing less. It is doing what matters most, in a way that is sustainable for both you and your students.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation in Episode 215 of Growing With Proficiency: The Podcast, and if you try the Star Student Interview sequence, tag me on Instagram @claudiamelliott. I would love to see your star students shine.
