CURRICULUM, MUSIC, AND COMMUNITY | MAKE YOUR OWN MUSIC

Open-ended interviewing

HOW CAN YOU TEACH students to ask good, open-ended questions in interviews? Here are some suggestions.

1. Practice with prompts or "tellabouts."

Our goal is to avoid questions that invite yes/no responses or short answers, and thus to encourage "conversation" rather than "interrogation." This means staying away from many of the standard who/what/when/where/how questions that we're told lie at the heart of newspaper writing. Instead, let's encourage students to ask questions that invite fuller answers.
     A good way to start is to get kids thinking about the way that questions begin.
For easy remembering, we call these beginnings "tellabouts," as in, "Tell me about..."
Many (but not all) of these beginnings introduce a statement rather than a question, inviting the person being interviewed to elaborate their answer. Characteristic tellabout prompts include:

"Tell me about..."
"Why did..."
"Can you explain..."
"How does..."
"Please describe..."
"Tell me about a time when..."

2. Asking questions about feelings — "feeling phrases"

A good way to "follow the thread" of answers given to tellabouts is to explore the feelings associated with those stories. Questions about emotions or feelings almost always spur further conversation, encouraging those being interviewed to move beyond purely factual answers to responses that are more personal. Talking about personal feelings shifts the ground of the conversation; suddenly, there's no right or wrong, but only the sharing of uniquely personal experience.
     To make these particular tellabouts easier to remember, we call them "feeling phrases." Once again, the easiest way to invite talk about feelings is to introduce your questions with a simple opening like:

"How do you feel about..."

Another approach is to follow up a statement or story with a feeling question:

"How did that make you feel?"

Be sure to encourage your students to share their feelings as well. Once people start talking about feelings, the formal framing of "an interview" often slides away, giving way to a less formal — and usually more meaningful — conversation.

3. Following the thread of a conversation

"Tellabouts" and "feeling phrases" are two ways of prompting conversational exchange. But they can only set the stage for what is perhaps the most important conversational skill — "following the thread." In essence, this means being able to listen carefully enough to what is being said so that you can ask further questions about the story being told.
     The easiest way to interview is to follow a list of questions. Though questions offer a comforting place to retreat, they also impose the interviewer's structure on the conversation. Predetermined questions almost always stall the conversation's flow, subtly telling the consultant that the interviewer is interested only in the topics that she/he came prepared to discuss. But when students base their questions on what they hear — as opposed to what they've written on their list — then the talk often moves into unexpected territory. This is when tellabouts and feeling phrases really come into play, as students invite the speaker to elaborate on points already made. In essence, the students are following the thread of the conversation, rather than introducing a new thread into the weave.
     One good way to follow the thread is to paraphrase what the consultant has already said, and then ask if there's more to add. For example, a student might say, "I heard you say... Is that what you meant? What would you like to add to that?" Another simple strategy is to ask for specifics on something mentioned in the story. If, for example, the consultant talks about corn shuckings in response to a question about early experiences with live music, then the student might say, "You mentioned corn shuckings. What were these like?"

Of course, all such elaboration will eventually come to an end. Once the flow begins to stall on its own accord, then the student should feel free to ask another question from the list. The list does, after all, serve a valuable function; however, it should serve more as a guide to conversation than as a questionnaire to be completed.

A presentational format with which most elementary school students are already familiar is "sharing time." Although many classrooms have abandoned this practice by the fourth grade, it nonetheless provides an excellent and comfortable way to practice interview skills. If, for example, you were to institute some form of regular musical "sharing" (with students bringing in a favorite song, a story about a song, a parent's story about a song, etc.), then practice in "following the thread" would probably occur quite naturally — and could easily be encouraged and modeled by the teacher.

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