The Star Student Interview is a powerful comprehensible input-driven activity that engages and builds connections with your students. It also sparks authentic and organic conversation in the target language. We can do this activity any day of the year, and at any time. This activity should be in the toolbox of any teacher.
I’m not sure who came out with the original idea of the Star Student Interview but I learned it from Bryce Hedstrom. These are the three main reasons I love this activity:
A. It’s a student center activity and aligns with the asset-based approach. I learned about the asset-based approach from Tan Huynh in his blog Empowering ELLs. This approach highlights the importance of understanding that our students come to our class with incredible assets. They have talents, interests, and experiences that can enrich our classes but we need to discover them. The Star Student Interview helps us discover those assets that our students bring to our classes.
B. It provides compelling and comprehensible input. When we ask comprehensible questions to our students related to their lives, we are just creating tons of input that is relevant to them because it is all about them. It also brings a lot of organic and authentic conversations that we can keep in the target language.
C. It builds community. The Star Student interview is not only about the star student. When you involve the class, you start finding similarities among your students and with us as teachers. We realize that we have a lot in common and we develop true relationships.
Get ready!
However, the Star Student interview requires some prep. These are my steps to get ready for this activity.
1. Prepare a set of questions to ask your star student. Depending on the level of your classes, think about questions that can be answered using one or two words. For novice levels, think about questions that can be answered with a proper noun!
2. Add translations and visuals to make each question comprehensible to any student in your class. Staying comprehensible is essential.
3. Provide sentence starters and helpful vocabulary so students can answer the questions in the target language.
I have created some basic questions for the beginning of the year, that you can get by clicking here. I also created some sets of questions for specific months or seasons. This one is for November if you want to get it, just click here.
I also have the one for December ready. This one includes not only tons of questions but input-based assessments and structured output activities for novice and intermediate learners. Click here to get that.
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Making it happen in your class!
Once you have the set of questions, you need to do the activity in class. These are my steps to complete the interview:
➡ Ask for a volunteer in class. You’ll always have a student or a couple of students who want to participate. Once this activity is popular in your class, most of them will love to participate.
➡ Bring the student to the front of the class. If you’re virtual, ask your start student to use the mic and greet the class.
➡ Ask each question to the student making sure that she or he understands the question. Depending on the student, you may want to prompt the answer. For example, you can say in the target language:
How old are you? Fourteen? Yes or no?
Prompting answers will help you stay in the target language and make your student feel safe and comfortable.
➡ Make the class part of the conversation. For some questions, stop and ask the class. You can say: Who is fifteen in this class? What do you prefer, turkey or ham?
➡ Keep it short and make it even shorter if you see your star student is uncomfortable or the class is not fully invested. Sometimes our students are not ready for this activity and we need to recognize and honor that. Let it go. Keep it short and move on. Maybe you can do it next week.
What’s next?
Write it down! I learned about Write and Discuss a few years ago from Mike Peto and since then I have used this strategy after any oral input activity in my class, and the star student interview is not different. Once we finish our interview, we, as a class, write a paragraph about our star student. I asked questions to my class and they shared what they remembered. These are some examples. Those texts become gold in my class and I can create tons of reading activities with them.
I hope you are sold, and you’re ready to start doing these interviews with your classes too. Let me know.
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