Relationships
Any teacher worth their salt will tell you that relationships are absolutely key to building a safe and comfortable classroom environment. Even in a normal year, the kids crave making connections with the adults in their schools, whether they know it or not. They all long to be understood and heard, even if they act "too cool" for such things. Some kids are easy to get to know. They are open books. They will just gush about the new kitty they got, or show you their most recent art. Some will show you their latest TikTok, or go into great detail about how amazing Among Us is.
Other kids, not so much. No matter how much you try, you can't get some kids to open up. I believe that they still want the connection, but maybe they need you to work harder for it. I can respect that. I'll be honest I am not sure I *understand* it, but I do respect it. The relationships we have with those kids -- the closed books, the silent observers-- those are the ones that are the most important; we can't know if they are just shy and quiet, or truly suffering in silence and desperately need help.
Not Quite Sold
I had heard about Special Person Interviews (SPI's) a couple of times, and it sounded good, but also like a big time commitment. I honestly can't remember if I first heard about SPI's from creator Bryce Hedstrom directly, or from someone else who had tried them. Either way, I was interested in the concept. Each day a class member gets interviewed in the target language. Kinda cool, but I wasn't sold on it. I didn't see how the kids would be expected to answer in the target language and I had other routines that I didn't want to give up. I thought it was cool in concept but that I wouldn't be able to make it work. So I gave up without ever trying them. Now that I think about it, I must have heard about them from someone other than Bryce because I really didn't "get it" and surely Bryce would've explained that which I wasn't understanding.
Then my friend, my colleague, my teaching soul-sister started using them. She was making it work. She was raving about how great they were. She had already opened my eyes to the world of CI and I trust her as a professional. But I couldn't figure out the concept for some reason. I didn't get how she could devote so much class time to the interviews and get the kids responding. So I asked her for a demonstration. I am so grateful that she obliged.
She had me act as a student in her Spanish classroom. I can understand enough Spanish to get by in a level one classroom, so it was a perfect set-up. She did a mock lesson for me, with me as the special person. When I couldn't answer in a whole sentence, I resorted to Si and No. It made sense to me but I still had questions. "What do you do if the kid can't answer in a full Spanish sentence?" I think I confused her. She was like, I modeled that for you. When you couldn't say "Yes, my favorite animal is the dog" in Spanish, and you just said "yes", I repeated the full sentence for you. "Class, Karen's favorite animal is the dog. My favorite animal is the dog, too!"
Sold!
On goes the lightbulb. Wait--you mean these aren't about language performance? Bless her, she tried not to laugh too hard. No--SPI is not about their performance. It's all part of CI (comprehensible input). It's about them hearing, not creating. If they can start to create that's awesome. But that's not the focus. But even more so, this is about (you guessed it) building relationships with kids. It's about you learning who they are. It's about them, learning about their classmates, and finding people they have things in common with. Yes, it's also language input and that's important. But getting to know them as people, that's the real deal. Then later down the road you can use their interests in stories and lessons.
Ok. Sold. I promised to try it. I was nervous, but it's not like I couldn't handle it. I know how to ask follow-up questions. I know how to restate, how to model, how to bring the language down to a comfortable level for first-year students.
Since we are now largely online, I gave my kids a slideshow on Google Slides. They had a template slide that included their name, a few spaces to put interests and favorite things, a hero, their birthday, things like that. Oh--and their pronouns. It's so important to honor the pronouns they use and when you've literally never even seen some students we can't assume their gender. (Woah. Need to rephrase that. We can't assume gender. Full Stop.) They spent a class period filling out the slide with pictures. They didn't have to use any target language on it, except for their French pronouns and 3 adjectives (which we had already spent some time on). Here's the slide template I use, along with my completed slide (since I can't share a student's information, you get mine!) for reference.
The next Monday, we did it. I had pre-selected a student for each hour, and we discussed some of the questions for the Special Person. The following day, we reviewed the Monday's work and then answered more of the questions. But this time, I typed out their answers on a Kid Grid (a spreadsheet of the questions so we can keep track of everyone's answers as we go along). The more interviews we did, the more I started to change up the language I was using. I was able to slowly "level up the language" from "Suzie est de Lawrence" to "Mark habite à Lawrence" to "Jane vient de Lawrence, mais elle est née à Wichita". I am not expecting them to create with it. But they are being exposed to it, every single school day. (Thursday/Friday is a new Special Person)
Better than expected
Even though I am so happy with the slow but steady advancements I am making with them, the reason these are so valuable, again, is the relationships I am trying to form with kids, some of whom I have literally never met in person, or even seen. I was finally able to see them (they added selfies to the slide), talk to them directly about their interests, and help connect kids who had things in common. One huge positive, and the reason I will never give up the SPI's is when "Mary" was the special person. Mary was quiet. I never saw her name pop up in the chat. I didn't even know if she was listening to me. She was in the WebEx, but was she even in the same room as her computer? Mary, it turns out was born in LA, and her older brother "John" is her hero. She loves paella and video games, and being with family. Mary-who had never spoken or written in class before shared some personal information with me and her classmates. But a couple of days later, for the first time, Mary thanked me at the end of class, told me to have a great day, and said goodbye.
That to me was a minor miracle. Was she just quiet, disinterested in French, or a student in crisis? I still don't know. I hope she's just a quiet person. But if the lines of communication have opened even just a crack, I'd say that SPI's are time well spent. I will never start a year without them, and I am starting to work on a level 2 version of the activity - same concept but deeper questions.
What Next? - The Kid Grid
As we gather information about students, we need a place to collect it. Enter The Kid Grid (credit to Tina Hargaden). The Kid Grid is a Google Sheet (or Excel, or whatever floats your boat) in which all the information you collect in class is typed. I spend the second day of a special person typing in the data the students provide. We look at the student's images for about 30 seconds, then I swipe to the Grid. I ask them to tell me what they remember about our person. It's fine if they use English, but some will at least try the TL soon enough. As you can see in this sample, we started pretty simply. "She lives in CITY" and "She likes pizza". But then we expand (as noted above), and we included things like "Jane says that Ellen lives in CITY" and "Paul knows that Ellen eats pizza". It has been a GREAT way to get those little tags in, without having to expressly teach them. (Pro-Tip - I make a new page for each class, so it stays organized)
I have yet to do this but, another idea is to take a few interviews and turn them into narratives. You can do compare/contrast, or group "like" kids together, or whatever you want. Some people even do little quizzes with the information, or you can even write up a Textivate story.
If you would like more information, check out Cécile Lainé's Special Person Interview post here.
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