What Makes a Good Interview?

Preparation and practice are the keys to a successful interview and amazing story. This lesson uses a famous art project, Humans of New York, to reverse-engineer good interview questions and techniques. Before you write your own interview questions, understand your goal: to get soundbites that connect with your audience, illuminate the topic and move your story forward. Click on the Activities Tab to complete the lesson.

• What makes an interview successful?
• How can you prepare for an interview to ensure that you get the information and soundbites you need for your story?

• Learn how to write and ask good questions
• Understand the importance of research and preparation
• Practice listening
• Learn how to use empathy and curiosity to guide a conversation -- critical communication skills for journalism and for life

This lesson can be used at any time to build communication, problem-solving, and organization skills. Use this lesson as a stand-alone, or the warm-up to the interview preparation lesson as part of your student journalism project.

Interviews are central to most stories you see in the news. By doing an interview, students will have a much deeper understanding of the process, challenges, and decisions made by reporters and editors. These are all critical parts of media literacy and understanding the different elements of journalism that result in the video, audio, or text story that you find online.

Practicing interviews will help students understand how people talk with one another and explore different perspectives. Additionally, students who go outside their school walls and conduct interviews with local leaders, experts, etc. are engaging with their community in powerful and meaningful ways. Interviews help students follow their curiosity, go beyond textbooks and google, and gives them a tool to explore topics in real-world situations.

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?”

View this video interview with Brandon Stanton, in which he recounts the background of “Humans of New York,” his motivation for pursuing it, and its growth into a global project.

After viewing, have students individually complete a “Connect-Extend-Challenge” reflection:

Consider what you have just read, seen, or heard, and then ask yourself:

• How are the ideas and information connected to what you already know?
• What new ideas did you get that broadened your thinking or extended it in different directions?
• What challenges or puzzles emerge for you?

Then, as a whole group, discuss:

• Why did Stanton extend this project beyond New York City?
• According to Stanton, what unites people across the globe? Do you agree with this assessment?
• How might Stanton need to adapt his communication style depending on the region of the world where he’s working, and depending on the subject that he’s working with?

Divide the class into groups of three for practice interviews. Explain that they are going to practice interviewing each other. Choose a goal for the interview:

• A story about the person’s name (either first or last name).
• A story about an obstacle you faced and what you did.
• A story about a moment when you helped someone else or someone helped you.

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 details 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?”

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. Keep Slide 11 up at the front of the room. (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 (Slide 11):

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

Ask: 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?

This resource is part of the Global Education Toolkit and was made possible with support from the Longview Foundation.