What Makes a Good Interview?

Interviewing requires you to actively listen, focus, think on your feet, and react appropriately to what the other person says. When you plan for an interview, you need to assess what you don’t know—a metacognitive skill—and learn a lot about the interview subject because otherwise, the interview will be awkward. This is real life, with real consequences if you’re unprepared and a real payoff if you do well—the heart of project-based learning.

Listening and really trying to appreciate where the other person is coming from is also an exercise in empathy and discovering how to connect. These life skills will help prepare students for college and jobs, and interviewing is a great way to address high school ELA and NGSS standards around communication, evaluating pertinent information, pulling important quotes, and emphasizing salient points, as well as ISTE and media literacy standards of digital production and multimedia presentations.

A really fun and engaging way to practice composing better questions is to reverse engineer Humans of New York, a project that started when photographer Brandon Stanton decided to tell the stories of 10,000 random people. Stanton meets people on the street, takes their picture, and interviews them. He publishes each picture with a snippet of the interview in which the person describes something significant from their life.

This lesson is based on an exercise that Iowa English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling created to help her students get to know each other.

Estimated time to complete: 20 Minutes

Explain that today’s lesson is about how to write good interview questions.

You will use Humans of New York to reverse-engineer effective interview questions.

Show the following slides one at a time.

• Ask a student to read the quote out loud.
• Give students three minutes to write down three questions that Brandon Stanton could have asked to get these stories.
• Share out questions and ask the rest of the class for feedback on each question.
• Explain that reporters avoid yes or no questions.
• Use the slides to call on a student and answer, “Do you like pizza?” Then call on other students with the more useful questions “Describe your favorite pizza.”
• Point out the imagery in the student’s answer (ie: pepperoni, flat crust, from a certain pizza place) and how that begins to give you direction for your b-roll and visuals.
• Useful ways to start questions include:
  • “Describe...”
  • “Tell me...”
  • “Identify...”
  • “Explain..."
  • “Help me understand…”
  • “How did that make you feel?”
• Explain that good reporters ask follow-up questions. For example, if the reporter asked, “tell me about someone who has had a strong influence on your life” a follow-up question could be, “Describe your father’s office. How did it make you feel?”

Estimated time to complete: 20 Minutes

Divide the class into groups of three for practice interviews. Explain that they are going to practice interviewing each other. The goal of the interview is to find out a story about the person’s name (either first or last name).

Each student will interview another student for 4 minutes and then the third person in the group will give them feedback on their questions and their interviewing technique. (Student A interviews B, and Student C gives feedback; Student B interviews C and Student A gives feedback; Student C interviews Student A and Student B gives feedback)

Students should use this feedback template:

1. Start with something that was successful about the interview
2. Give specific feedback on areas to improve
3. End with ideas for how to prepare for future interviews

At the end of the class, ask the reflection questions below.

Ask students: What did you learn from working on this project? What did you like best about it? What did you dislike and why?

Ask students: How might interviewing skills be useful in your life right now? In the future?

• What are four words you can use to start a question that will help get strong and useful answers?
• What is a follow-up question and why would you use one?