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Question for the Group – Persona Especial
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11 thoughts on “Question for the Group – Persona Especial”
The Special Person has potential to add a lot of new language. Personalized (true to life) and customized (storyasked & fictional) language probably sticks the best, so maybe we can take more liberties and be less targeted.
When I did “intensive” personal interviews (10+ questions per student and multiple days with the same student) it was 4th quarter and my middle schoolers had previous years with me. I won’t do it this way ever again. If I were to do this 1st quarter with beginners, you do as Bryce recommends: limit myself to 1-3 questions and repeat with numerous students in the same class. You can create an image around each question by asking more and more details (real and/or fictional). By allowing the rest of the class to get in on the details you get more engagement. This is where personal interviews, PQA, and stories start to blend, but we don’t have to put the activity into a category box.
I plan to try this year to create charts out of personal interviews as step 1 of TPRS. e.g.
Students Favorite beach Knows how to swim At the beach likes to . . .
Bob South beach Yes make sand castles
Jane State beach Yes snorkel
. . .
etc.
*btw, this is a Natural Approach activity called a “Personal Interview.” What makes it “TPRS” is its targeted nature and the storyasking.
The chart lost its formatting when I posted. Here’s another attempt:
Students . . . . . . Favorite beach . . . . . . Knows how to swim . . . . . . At the beach likes to
Bob . . . . . .. . . . . South beach . . . . . .. . Yes . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . .make sand castles
Jane. . . . . .. . . . . State beach . . . . . .. . . Yes . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . .snorkel
etc.
I have been trying to very hard to make persona especial fly for me this year. After spending time with Bryce this summer I really got into the time and care he puts into the persona especial. The problem I found was similar to yours. These students mostly know each other since they have been going to school together since kinder. It is hard to find compelling details.
What I have started to do is take details of a student’s life and turn it into an Ask a Story with a Read and Discuss with at home reading with a parent selfie. Sorry for the run on sentence 😉
Alli (the student) has a dog named Henry and he ended up being from Quebec and used to work as a secret agent…later made it to Arizona because he entered the witness protection program. The story goes on to review structures and include past tense features.
When they all know each other in a small school making persona especial takes some imagination. I ran into the mother of Allie and the mom was so happy to hear that class became about Allie and their beloved Tibetian Spaniel.
Turning boring details into a full story seemed to go okay. If we couldn’t go anywhere with the details we just moved on to something else. I think I am going to continue this throughout the whole year with my small classes.
Mike, I’d wondered how your new school was going. It sounds a lot like my previous one — they almost all knew each other very well, too. Sounds like imagined details were the way to go.
“When they all know each other in a small school making persona especial takes some imagination.”
That’s how I’ve felt about it too. I could see it working beautifully in a larger school.
I’m doing the same thing… using a snippet of their real life, then morphing it into a pre-scripted story.
First of all, this is my first contribution here after being a voyeur for some time. It’s about time I chip in! I have loved doing Personas especiales the last two years, but am debating whether to use it this year for a few reasons. I, too, teach at a school where the kids know each other well, but that wasn’t a problem — I always give my kids the option of giving real or invented answers to ANYthing, and I learn a lot about their personalities either way! (It would most likely have gotten boring had I limited them to “real” responses only). But lots of “real” answers lead to great mini-stories. “Do you have siblings?” “Yes, my little brother is the devil.” (Begging a story!) It turns out the little brother, who has big hair, always steals my student’s chicken (his favorite food) at the dinner table. Of course, we have to act this out, and then everyone has to tell a sibling story. It is so much fun! It did, however, take me a LOOOOOONG time to get through even my smallest class. Obviously, CI was going on the whole time, and we really bonded. However, I just can’t do it in the same manner this year. My department is actually full CI (I love it!), but we have had a lot of turnover, and those of us remaining are trying to keep everyone (old and new) somewhat on the same page so that we can share a lot of materials and plans and save some of the work of training new members. And I seem to the only one who really loves spending limitless time on Personas especiales. I’m considering limiting each interview to a few questions as suggested by Bryce, and perhaps not going through my entire roster all at once, but breaking it up to one or two sessions a week. Has anyone tried that? Not sure…
As for question 1 on this post, I did have a few students launch into English as well (in particular, I remember a student new to our school who had had far less Spanish than her new peers). I allowed her to whisper her answer to me, and then I would condense the information shared into comprehensible TL chunks that I would write/announce to the class.
Invented Sibling Stories. Now THAT has some potential, right there! I can just see my sixth graders with that one.
Emily,
So glad you shared. I think you are spot on…going through the whole roster IMO takes away from making it feel special in a way. The students figure out that we are using a formula or routine for this. Varying the use persona especial in small setting like Diane and Jim mentioned makes it more special.
Persona especial is a brilliant strategy but hard to keep novel if we do it all at once. We can keep it novel by disguising what we are doing and not use it everyday. The strategy of persona especial can also coincide with curriculum that requires thematic unit…
My persona especial sessions have been part of a plural effort to use high frequency language, get to know students, find where students breakdown with the language, and pre-teach 2 different novels.
For Nuevo Houdini we are PQAing (persona especial) about strict parents and household rules.
For Noches misteriosas en Granada using persona especial to focus on student’s possessions and the “perfect life.”
It seems to be working for my classes. The students are getting some free style CI and think they are just hanging out and talking. In another part of the class we are using student actors and the novels so they are getting the structured part of this process.
Check this out from Bryce Hedstrom (report number 2 should be out this afternoon)
CONTEE SEELY’S CLASSROOM OBSERVATIONS
I have been grateful to have publisher and author Contee Seely observe my classes two times so far this year. Being watched by someone that literally wrote the book on TPRS (Fluency through TPR Storytelling, with Blaine Ray) could have been an intimidating experience, but Contee is so gracious that he made me feel at ease and this allowed me to teach my plan without feeling self-conscious. He speaks Spanish so he was able to understand everything that was said in each class, and with his wealth of knowledge and experience he was also able to simultaneously see and process all of the components of what I was doing, understand why I was doing them and why they worked.
He saw my students and me on the very first day of class as I set the expectations, taught the routines and practiced the procedures that lay the groundwork for a successful year. It was helpful to see my teaching through his eyes, and I am looking forward to having him return for more observations in the future.
Here are Contee’s first observations:
On Friday, August 14, 2015, I had the good fortune to observe two of Bryce Hedstrom’s classes at Roosevelt High School in Johnstown, Colorado. These were the first sessions of the school year for these two classes. The first class was Spanish 1. Bryce had a seating chart all set and it was displayed on the screen in the front of the class so that everyone could find their seat. He gave one student a printed copy of it so that she could help out. The desks were arranged so that each half of them faced the center of the room with a wide aisle between them that went from Bryce’s desk at the back to the board at the front of the room.
The very first Spanish these students heard and learned was “Lo siento” (I’m sorry), which Bryce instructed them to say if they arrived late to class. Nearly the whole class was spent on classroom procedures–what to say and what to do in various circumstances. He taught them that when he said, “Clase,” they were to stop whatever they might be doing and answer, “Sí, señor.” He explained that it was his job to prepare them to get along not just in this class, but in life in a range of situations.
He taught them how to come into class. They were to put their backpacks and whatever else they had with them somewhere around the edges of the room. To practice this, he had them all get up with their backpacks, etc. and go out and then come back in and put their things near one of the walls. He explained that most of the time they would have nothing on their desks (pupitres), because their main job was to listen and understand. The desks are convertible; the writing surface can be swung around to the back so that it is out of the way. They practiced moving the writing surface behind the desks and also back to the front.
He said sometimes they would move all the desks to near the walls of the room so that whole class could form a circle or sit on the floor or do some particular activity. They practiced moving the chairs to the periphery of the room and back into the seating arrangement.
Bryce told them that it was very important for them to understand everything. It was his job to speak Spanish. It was their job to listen and understand. He showed the class a hand signal they should use if he was speaking too fast for them to follow, and another signal to indicate they did not understand.
He told them that much of what they would be dealing with in the class was information about the individual students in the class. So they were to obtain a particular type of notebook or composition booklet that cost about 80¢ and bring it to class the next day and every day. They would be taking notes on facts about other students as Bryce interviewed them, and they would be quizzed about the other students. He said he would eventually interview every student. He mentioned that one time a new student came in the middle of a course and that, as she was leaving her first class session, he overheard two other girls telling her that she “was going to love this class; we all like one another and care about one another.”
He told them that ¿Cómo se llama? meant What’s your name? Everything that he was teaching them in Spanish he either wrote on the board in the front of the room or he pointed to it with a laser pointer where it was already displayed on a wall. He asked some students their names. They needed to answer only with their first name. Bryce would then say, for example, “La chica se llama Megan” (The girl’s name is Megan.) Bryce would sometimes follow with “¿Prefieres Megan o Meg?” (Do you prefer Megan or Meg?)
This class was composed of freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, so Bryce would also ask “¿En cuál grado estás?” (Which grade are you in?) and used the numbers nueve, diez, once and doce, which the students answered with.
He also started assigning jobs to students. The first one was the screen person, the student who raised and lowered the projection screen. Another one was the sneeze person, who, whenever anyone sneezed, would loudly count “uno, dos, tres.” And then the whole class would say, “Salud” (health).
He taught them how class ended. It didn’t end when the bell sounded. It ended when he said, “Gracias por aprender” (Thank you for learning.), and the class answered, “Gracias por enseñarnos” (Thank you for teaching us.). They practiced this beforehand, and then they did this at the end of class.
The second class was Spanish 3. The students, Bryce told me, had not been his students before. They had another teacher, who mainly gave them worksheets, so they were not used to speaking and understanding as much. Nonetheless, Bryce was able to use more Spanish with them, mostly simple things. Much of what he did was nearly the same as in the Spanish 1 class. He was training them in how the class functioned.
In this class he did more interviewing and was able to ask a few more questions, such as “¿Cuántos años tienes?” (How old are you?), “¿Trabajas?” (Do you work?) and “¿Dónde trabajas?” (Where do you work?) as well as “¿Tienes tu licencia? ” (Do you have your license?) and “¿Tienes un carro?” (Do you have a car?). The answers were very brief.
In both classes he was friendly and respectful to students and he promoted an atmosphere of respect, politeness and congeniality. These were both the very first classes of the school year, so they were unique and especially important for establishing a basis for all that would follow.
Thursday, August 20, the next week, I observed the same Spanish 1 class. This was their 5th class of the school year. To get into class, they had to give Bryce the password of the day, muy amable (very friendly, very nice–used as an expression of appreciation and thanks for a favor or help). He interviewed a few students, using more questions this time than in the first class session, questions such as those just above that he asked in the first Spanish 3 class. After interviewing, he had the students bring the writing part of their desks into writing position, and they wrote notes about the interviews while Bryce circulated and occasionally commented on something to a student.
Before class ended, he had the students move all the desks to the edges of the room. He took a large picture book and sat down with it in the front of the class for what is sometimes called “kindergarten day.” Most of the students sat on the floor in front of him. A few were on desks at the back of the room. Bryce read to them as he showed them the pictures and asked them a few questions in Spanish based on the words he was reading to them. The bell rang and Bryce asked them to put the desks back in place. He said, “Gracias por aprender,” (Thank you for learning) and the students responded, “Gracias por enseñarnos” (Thank you for teaching us).
Michael,
“Persona especial is a brilliant strategy but hard to keep novel if we do it all at once. We can keep it novel by disguising what we are doing and not use it everyday. The strategy of persona especial can also coincide with curriculum that requires thematic unit…”
I love this! I think this may inspire some of my less-inclined cohort to try the interview model too.
Yes this was the invention of Jody Noble. An excellent tool.