FIN Commons

Some Tips For Interviewing

Set up appointments well in advance. Be prepared for some people to flake out. It may take 2-3 attempts for you to land the interview.

Because your inquiry is about education, of course you will feel that your interviews should naturally take place in classrooms. But that doesn’t have to be the case. You can talk over lunch, in a park, or even at the interviewee’s house or place of work. Doing this will give your overall footage a sense of variety.

When picking interview spots, the most crucial thing you should do is to “scout” the location for its potential background audio problems. As a general rule, filming indoors will allow you to control your sound more, but there is something to be said for conducting the interview in an interesting outdoor locale, like near a river or on a balcony, etc. The key is to first determine if the background ambient sound will be a distraction or not.

When you do film in a classroom, take a few minutes to determine if the room has any interesting visual aspects that you can include in the scene. Maybe there are interesting “props” in the room, like maps or globes or science equipment. Our CTE schools have a great opportunity in this regard, because their classrooms are often such visually interesting places.

When interviewing listen carefully to what they say. That may seem obvious, but you would be surprised how often the interviewer is reading their own interview questions, or adjusting the camera, and in so doing, they don’t hear some important tidbit delivered by the interviewee that would make for a very powerful follow-up question.

 Let them do the talking. This too may seem very obvious, but you would be amazed how easy it is for the interviewer to start in discussing the issue at hand with the interviewee, and next thing you know you have 30 minutes of footage in which the interviewer has talked for 20 minutes of it! (Or maybe I am just talking about myself here!)

Try to make the interview as comfortable as possible for both you and the interviewee. The more the process feels like a regular conversation—in which you are playing the part of attentive listener—the better. In other words, try not to cling too much to your “10 questions.” It can give the interview a kind of stilted or canned feel.

If the interviewee talks fast, or gets themself lost, or their answer peters out…it is perfectly OK to ask them to repeat themselves. Often their second attempt uncovers new aspects of their answer. Another tip is to rephrase your question if it feels like the interviewee is struggling a bit.

Once people warm up don’t be surprised if they don’t shut up. Don’t be surprised if they get off track. Find gentle ways to steer them back.

Group interviewing may work for you.

Consider showing your questions to the interviewee ahead of time. This allows them to focus in on where you are headed. (Interviewees WANT to do well.)

VERY IMPORTANT: Avoid posing YES/NO Style questions. It is MUCH harder to compose questions that are NOT yes/no in style, but obviously yes/no questions limit severely the interviewee. You will want to take the time to come up with more open-ended questions. You may notice that one strategy of seasoned interviewers is to not even really ASK questions. But rather they will frequently state their own premises or biases or hunches and ask the interviewee to comment on that. This may feel a bit like “leading the witness” but in our experience interviewees are very comfortable about—and capable of—supplying their own counter-hunch.

 If your first 2-3 interviewees all give you more-or-less the same responses, try coming up with questions that create a little controversy.

Also, It’s perfectly fine to say, “John says ‘blah blah blah” about the topic. What is your response to that, Maria?”

 Have fun…remember to breathe…