Interviewing: Speaking, Listening, and Learning for Professional Life

INSTRUCTOR’S RESOURCE GUIDE

for

Interviewing: Speaking, Listening, and Learning for Professional Life

Second Edition

Rob Anderson, Saint Louis University

and

G. Michael Killenberg, University of South Florida St. Petersburg

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CONTENTS

I. Preface

II. Why Teach Interviewing?

III. Who Are the Authors?

Brief Biographies

IV. A Vision for the Book

V. Key Features of Interviewing

VI. Guiding Principles for Experiential Interviewing Classes

Classroom Atmosphere

Assignments and Grades

VII. Sample Syllabus

VIII. Using the Book, Chapter by Chapter

I: Preface

An interviewing course is one of the most interesting and fulfilling opportunities available to communication instructors. In it, students make connections they’ve never considered before and grow in ways they’d never anticipated. At the same time, an interviewing course helps us stretch as instructors in important ways:

• Teachers who specialize in interpersonal communication research will find their interests relevant to teaching interviewing, but they also must become familiar with media practices and the range of professions communication students enter.

• Teachers who prepare students for media careers in such courses as reporting, broadcast management, public relations, and advertising will find their professional experience directly relevant to interviewing. But many of them will want to read more about the dynamics of face-to-face talk and benefit from broader exposure to communication theory.

• Teachers who stress skills and speech performance can continue to do so effectively in an interviewing course, but they also will want to be able to explain how fundamental concepts of communication research contribute to interviewing success.

• Teachers who stress goal setting, persuasion, and rhetorical success will find themselves well prepared to teach interviewing, but they also may want to learn more about the ethics, intercultural sensitivities, and philosophical principles underlying the complex choices of interviewers and interviewees in professional life.

In other words, an interviewing course is a nexus for many courses in an undergraduate communication curriculum. If you have the opportunity to teach interviewing, you’re likely to become a generalist in the best and most practical sense.

We developed this resource guide for instructors who want to augment their courses with extra materials, readings, and activities for their students, or who simply want to deepen their own knowledge and familiarity with various contexts of interviewing.

Despite the need to become a generalist, most instructors, we believe, teach interviewing from a “home base” determined by their own experience, skills, or research specialization. For some, that home base might be organizational interviewing. Others start from their interest in interpersonal conversation or from interviews conducted in their own scholarly research. But it’s a rare instructor who has direct professional or research experience in the full range of topics, methods, and approaches covered in the typical general interviewing course. Committed teachers supplement their own experience with a wide range of additional resources representing the direct experience of others.

We appreciate your interest in our ideas about interviewing and teaching, and we welcome comments and suggestions from you and your students about the book and, particularly, how we might improve subsequent editions.

Please reach us through e-mail at and .

II: Why Teach Interviewing?

A carefully prepared and rigorous interviewing class provides many benefits for students and teachers:

• Interviewing is one of the most practical skill clusters a communication student can learn. Effective interviewers and interviewees can expect to obtain jobs more readily and advance in careers more steadily. Most, if not all, communication professions require interviewing or interview-type skills: Public relations and advertising professionals interview clients to discover their needs and goals; journalists seek politicians’ opinions, which then make news; teachers and trainers question their students to determine what learning goals to stress; sales professionals conduct persuasive interviews daily; personnel managers select and evaluate employees; and so forth.

• Interviewing gives students confidence in their ability to interact with different kinds of people — those from different cultures, those with more (or less) power or prestige, those suffering through interpersonal or organizational crises. An education in interviewing is an education in flexibility, sensitivity, and acceptance as well as an avenue to new kinds of personal power. Students in interviewing classes learn that differences of style, content, and culture energize learning. They learn to welcome differences as fertile opportunities.

• Interviewing provides students with exceptional opportunities to receive and provide feedback. Many students report that they learn as much or more about themselves in an interviewing class as they do anywhere in the curriculum. They glimpse themselves in action when video recorded. They see and hear how others react to them. They get the benefit of others’ coaching. They learn how to make their personality characteristics — even shyness — work for them rather than against them.

• Interviewing is, in a sense, a crossing point or permeable boundary between different segments of the discipline of communication, including interpersonal communication and mass communication. Interviewing is what professionals in organizational communication, rhetoric, public relations, advertising, journalism, and other subfields and research specializations have in common. In an interviewing class, students discover how the overall discipline of communication draws upon a common core of ideas.

• Interviewing helps students become better learners in other classes. Studying interviewing has direct transfer value; students learn new ways, for example, to ask a philosophy professor for clarification about Kant or Heidegger. They develop new skills for asking classroom questions in ways that articulate other students’ confusions, and without putting teachers on the defensive. They may develop new creativity, perhaps discovering a term paper topic for urban sociology by wondering if neighborhood police would be available for interviews about changing perceptions of adolescent crime.

• Interviewing is one of the foundations of news and public dialogue in a free society. Serious students of interviewing tend to read and watch the news regularly — and critically. If a teacher helps them track carefully how interviews propel presidential debates, shape congressional investigations, and influence foreign policy, they will develop analytical and critical habits that will stay with them for a lifetime. In addition, effective interviewers and interviewees add their own voices to the public dialogue at school board sessions, public hearings, neighborhood association meetings, town hall debates, and local elections.

III: Who Are the Authors?

We met more than 35 years ago as young assistant professors at a Midwest university, where we worked in a large room of open faculty offices, subdivided by bookcases and filing cabinets. We taught in different departments — Rob in speech communication and Mike in mass communication — but we couldn’t, even if we had wanted to, avoid meeting one another and overhearing each other talking to students and colleagues. As we got to know each other better, we came to realize that together we had something to say about interviewing beyond our own academic disciplines and practical experience.

We began to write in collaboration to encourage others to see the benefits of merging practical experience with theoretical concepts and research in human behavior. Some practitioners become antagonistic to theories of any stripe and dismissive of any discussion that is even faintly abstract. On the other hand, some social science researchers dismiss practitioners’ experience as either idiosyncratic or based on unreflective bad habits. Most of us fall in a middle ground, but it’s sometimes hard to get people in separate camps to talk with each other and come to recognize both the valuable practicality of theory-based research and the theoretical potential of vigorous concrete experience. We hope Interviewing helps to bridge gaps between theorists and practitioners.

Brief biographies:

Rob Anderson has applied his research in the theory of dialogue to practical problems of interviewing, conflict management, listening, and everyday communication ethics. In addition, he has facilitated numerous workshops in interpersonal communication for student and professional audiences. His current interests include exploring how complex institutions like the university and contemporary journalism can enhance public dialogue more effectively. Now professor of communication at Saint Louis University, Rob has received major teaching awards at two universities, and he is the author or coauthor of 11 books and numerous articles in journals in communication, journalism, English, and psychology.

G. Michael Killenberg acquired professional interviewing experience as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers, in addition to teaching journalism and mass communication at several colleges and universities. His current research focuses on newspaper-community relations, media law and ethics, and diversity within professional journalism. He was founding director of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, where he still teaches undergraduate and graduate students. His publications include numerous articles in professional and popular periodicals. His latest book on public affairs reporting was published in 2008. Besides collaborating on the original and second editions of Interviewing, he and Rob Anderson coauthored Before the Story: Interviewing and Communication Skills for Journalists and The Conversation of Journalism: Communication, Community, and News.

IV: A Vision for the Book

We wrote Interviewing for instructors and students who want to concentrate on the skills of interviewing through a course both professionally grounded and intellectually challenging. Interviewing will help students develop skills while they think systematically about the process; such an approach will help them decide how (and whether) those skills can be applied. We envision a general interviewing course both as a performance opportunity — a laboratory for skill development — and as an opportunity for students to reflect on the complex processes and ethical challenges of interpersonal communication.

Therefore, our textbook describes the practical skills of interviewing in the context of other concepts and courses students encounter as communication majors. We believe that many textbooks tend to present interviewing skills relatively prescriptively and tend to consider the interviewing course as somewhat isolated from the wider curriculum. We want to teach students how to interview and, beyond that, motivate them to become interested in interviewing by, for example, reading more about interviewing, participating more often in interviews in daily life, and applying interviewing skills in other courses.

To help instructors meet both objectives in their courses, we adopt what we term a “skills-plus” approach, in which students will understand how skills are related to basic appreciations of interpersonal communication, ethics, and research.

Each substantive chapter is divided into two parts — a “Basics” section in which skills are introduced and clearly discussed, and a “Beyond the Basics” section in which interviewing is related to wider issues in communication and everyday life. Although the “Beyond the Basics” discussions also might be considered essential reading by many instructors, other teachers might choose to assign only “The Basics” for certain chapters.

V: Key Features of Interviewing

• “Skills-plus” orientation — We describe essential skills thoroughly and go on to place them in conceptual context. With an effective blend of skills, appreciations, and knowledge, interviewing is therefore linked to other courses in the major, such as communication theory, research methods, interpersonal communication, listening, mass communication, organizational communication, and intercultural communication. Although the book helps students understand the concepts supporting behavioral advice, we’ve been selective in citing research; long footnotes detailing multiple research studies do not help students taking an interviewing course.

• Helpful and flexible organization within chapters — Each chapter is divided into “The Basics” and “Beyond the Basics” sections, allowing instructors more choice in making assignments and adapting the text to their courses.

• Helpful and flexible overall organization of chapters — The chapters of Part One develop basic skills and appreciations. The chapters of Part Two describe specific interview contexts and strategies. The final chapters in Part Three place interviewing in a wider analytical and cultural context.

• Clear division of basic interviewing skills into three interrelated types — listening, questioning, and framing. Listening is emphasized as the skill that enables interview-based learning in the first place; questioning is emphasized as the skill that focuses learning; and framing is emphasized as the skill that interprets and places learning in appropriate context. We believe no other text emphasizes listening skills as much as this one does, and no other text offers an extended treatment of the practical applications of the skill of framing.

• Student-friendly writing — We use a narrative style in which stories and examples, often about everyday college life, help students relate to the terms, concepts, and practices we introduce. Through examples and stories, students can see interviewing as an opportunity to learn more about their campuses, about their families and friends, and about themselves.

• Emphasis on how interviewing contributes to the quality of public dialogue — Throughout the book, we reinforce how interviewing can support democratic action. Perhaps more than any other textbook, Interviewing stresses how an awareness of communication ethics makes better citizens — citizens whose talk will be more civil, sensitive, and attuned to other voices in the political process.

• Integrated approach to both interviewer and interviewee roles — Interviewing, unlike some other textbooks, prepares students to be responsive and effective when conducting interviews. It also shows them how the roles of interviewer and interviewee are fully interdependent.

• Integrated ethics approach — Ethics, we stress, is not a separate concern for interview communicators; it is involved in all message choices. We offer examples of ethical issues in each chapter.