Teacher resources » Interview to go deeper

Interview to go deeper

Overview

Practice interviewing skills to deepen understanding about a real person, a fictional character, your community, or a problem or issue in your life. Interviewing opens up a wealth of information about a topic and developing questions fosters higher level critical thinking skills in students.

In this activity, students choose a subject to interview in order to unlock a depth of knowledge about a topic or subject that was previously unavailable to them. This activity can be integrated into a larger class research project or done as an individual project.

Keywords: Hook, ELA, Social Sciences

Good for: Individual work or teams

Grade level: K-12

Skill level: Intermediate

Student Instructions

Copy and paste the information below directly into the description box when creating your student assignment, or, use it as inspiration to make your own!

Pair up with another student and work to create a video in which you interview a subject to collect information about your topic. You will use an external camera or the webcam recording feature in the Classroom editor to complete this activity. Once you have collected all of your footage you can import your media into the editor and begin editing.

Lesson planning support

Tips to help your instruction in this activity or help to get you started!

Use this to launch a research project, inquiry or project based learning project. Interviewing is a great way for students to learn initial information about a topic or concept.
This project also works well as an individual project where students can learn how to craft questions that elicit responses from subjects. Have students design interview questions and practice with a partner asking and answering questions. This helps students feel comfortable with the process as interviewing can be a little awkward at first!
Use guided question techniques as well as question stems to scaffold and support younger learners or English language learners.
If you want a more structured approach to this project, try this by pairing students up and selecting one topic for the whole class. Then, as a class, create interview questions for potential subjects that would help you and your students learn more about the topic.

Learn more

Technical Skills

Students Will…

Academic Skills

Students will…

21st Century Skills

Students will…

Practice collecting external footage and importing that footage into the media section of WeVideo Classroom
Use audio, text, images, and footage together to create a polished final product.
Learn how to add transitions

Conduct short interviews based on focused questions in order to understand a subject
Make strategic use of digital media to express information
Apply a knowledge of language to understand how language functions in the context of an interview.

Use technology to interact with and collaborate with others.
Become creative communicators through the use of interview techniques captured through video.
Use flexible thinking when interacting with a subject

Learn more

Hook: This activity is a great way to launch a unit or an inquiry or project based learning experience. Using interviews to collect information on a topic or a subject is a great way to engage students in the learning process, deepen understanding, and enhance the learning experience for all learners.

English/Language Arts: This activity fits in any English-Language arts learning environment and hones in on anchor standards in writing, listening and speaking, and language. Students can also work on writing questions and critically positioning language to get the most of the their subjects.

Social Science: Use interviews to enlighten a history, sociology, or anthropology research project. This activity can be integrated into many facets of the social sciences and can be used to support a historical documentary, sociological or psychological experiment, or an anthropological oral history project.

Learn more