Art of the 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.

Use these slides with your students to help them prepare for their interview.

Ask students to fill in their pitch sheet and, if they have not already done so, spend 10 minutes writing their interview questions.

• Use slides 7-12 and explain that reporters avoid yes or no questions. 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 offers direction for b-roll and visuals.
• Useful ways to start questions include:
  • “Describe...”
  • “Tell me...”
  • “Identify...”
  • “Explain..."
  • “Help me understand..."
  • “How did that make you feel?”
• Suggest students ask a general question like “please explain who you are and what you do” at the beginning and repeat the question towards the end several times so that the subject becomes comfortable and gives the reporter several versions to use.

Explain that good reporters ask follow-up questions.

Play one of these two interviews and ask students to look for follow-up questions. You can use the transcript to highlight the follow-up questions and ask students why the reporter had to follow-up.

• NewsHour Chief Correspondent Amna Nawaz interviews Afghan President Ashraf Ghani
  VIDEO + TRANSCRIPT
• NewsHour Correspondent William Brangham interviews the CEO of the Dakota Access Pipeline
  VIDEO + TRANSCRIPT

Review what makes a good interview (slides 15-29)

• Share your enthusiasm. Why are you interested in this person? Start off by explaining why you want to do this story.
• You can ask your subject to repeat an answer.
  • “My questions will NOT be part of the final piece so please answer in a full sentence or please include part of the question as part of your answer.”
  • Ask them to restate an answer if it goes on too long, or seems incoherent. It is OK to do this.
  • “That was a great response, and it really covers a few areas. Can you talk about the first area a little more?”
  • “That was a great response, can you say that again in under 20 seconds?”
• Respect their time! Preparation helps you be efficient and make fewer mistakes.

Keys to being a good interviewer:

• Transparency.
• Build trust: as the producer, you want them to look and sound good.
• Your subject should feel that you have their back.

Before you end the interview:

“What would you like to add? Something we did not cover?”

“What are some misconceptions you’d like to clear up?”

Always debrief after an interview write down your impressions

Divide the class into groups of three to practice their questions.

Explain that each student is going to read their questions and look at their subject as they would in the real interview. Then, students will share feedback to make their questions stronger.

After the group activity, ask each student to share out a question that they want to make better and engage the class in brainstorming ways to make it stronger.

Explain that after the interview is complete, they will transcribe the audio file.

Transcribing is the key to understanding what to use in your story. Play this video produced by students at Etiwanda High School in California to understand why students will not want to transcribe, but really need to!

When your students have finished their transcriptions, the next step is Scripting

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?