change a teacher, interview skills...

Hello,

In the initial stages of this assignment it was obvious that good interview skills were going to help when it came to interviewing teachers from my school. As described in the Reidling text, good interview skills are an important characteristic of teacher-librarians in surveying students on their research goals. I therefore felt it would be good practice for me to try and interview these teachers to the best of my ability. During the interviews I was looking for information regarding their library resource use, and their attitudes towards using library resources within their classrooms. I quickly learned that as the interviewer I needed to read into each response in order to better form the next question to extract the most information. As I interviewed more teachers I began to get more comfortable with the process and began to think of the interview as a discussion and not so much a question and answer period. During the first interview I was frantically writing all the details but in the second and third interview I left most of the writing until after each interview. From a teacher-librarian perspective, interview skills would be more of a question and answer format, but when one is interviewing for information regarding personal thoughts and feelings then a more structured interview is more appropriate and beneficial.

Thanks.
-Regen