How to Help Students Develop Interviewing Skills

This how-to article accompanies the feature "Students Investigate Local Issues Through Service Learning."

The Center for Urban Pedagogy, a nonprofit organization that helps schools produce experiential curricula, believes that when students engage community leaders in conversation, it can lead to real and long-lasting civics education. Through interviews, students, according to CUP, "realize that the world is knowable, and you can find out how anything works by asking enough people." From CUP's urban-investigation curriculum, here are ideas and techniques for teaching students to become skilled interviewers:

Review the Basics

First, convey the fundamental goals of an interview, which are to

High-Quality Questions

Remind students that asking the right kinds of questions will elicit more meaningful responses. Advise your students to

Writing the Right Queries

To write high-quality questions, ask students to first research the interviewee and decide what kind of information they'd like to learn from that person. Then, to help students develop relevant questions, describe various categories of questions that could be asked during an interview:

Documenting the Interview

Students can capture interviews through note taking, audio or video recordings, taking photos, or asking for collateral materials such as pamphlets, posters, or books related to the interviewees and their work. "Take everything they are willing to give you, and then ask for more," CUP suggests. "Although it may seem useless at the time, it almost always comes in handy later on."

Practice Makes Perfect

The following hands-on activities can be used to help students practice and develop their interviewing skills:

Bernice Yeung is an Edutopia contributing editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, and the San Francisco Chronicle.